Impact of taka depreciation and inflation on foreign ownership in DSE banking stocks: Evidence from 2019-2025

Abstract

The report documents a five-month research internship at BRAC EPL Stock Brokerage Ltd. BESL is Bangladesh’s one of the leading brokerage firms and a subsidiary of BRAC Bank. The internship involved daily market reports generation, database maintenance and one pager generations. It also included several AI-assisted Python based automation projects. The automated One Pager generation system reduced a nine person days task to under five minutes. Also, a primary relational database design was created for the Research Department. The organization analysis shows that BESL follows a hybrid leadership style and holds a 60% market share of the foreign portfolio market. It has an award-winning research team, which is one of its competitive advantages. However, the five-year financial analysis reveals that BESL is not performing up to the mark. Over the years, net profit margin declined from 40.6% to -8.6%. Increasing operating costs are the reason behind it. Since the gross margin stayed above 70%, it was deducted that its core business was healthy. The main problem was the cost management. The project part focuses on the impact of inflation and BDT depreciation in foreign ownership. Four DSE listed banking stocks were selected. The observation period for the study was 2019-2025 and OLS regression and t-tests were used. The findings revealed that both macro variables negatively impacted foreign ownership. BRAC Bank showcased the strongest impact (adjusted R2=0.757). They also offer practical insights for policy and investment decisions for frontier capital markets like Bangladesh.