After being dragged down New Zealand’s benchmark index in recent months, aged-care provider Ryman Healthcare’s share price has bounced up more than 18% this week.

The S&P/NZX 50 index rose 13 points, or 0.10%, to 12,036.05. Across the main board, 68 stocks fell and 62 rose. Turnover was $113.8 million.

Grant Davies, an investment adviser at Hamilton Hindin Greene, said Ryman had continued its strong recovery on the index today and ended the day up 3.1% to $6.70.

Across other aged-care providers, Summerset Group was up 0.5% to $9.93, Arvida Group was up 0.9% to $1.19 and Oceania Healthcare jumped 2.3% to 89 cents.

After trading up throughout the day, within 15 minutes of the close fleet company Eroad jumped 19.1% to $1.06. It quickly settled to close at 93c. 

Hamilton Hindin Greene’s Mark Hampton said Eroad had been sitting at 90 cents earlier in the afternoon and due to the low volume exchanged over the day, he assumed it could’ve been a “silly buy”.

Manawa Energy told the market this morning that its national hydro storage had risen slightly in its third quarter to 133% of average, while inflows were strong across the period and were up 48-gigawatt hours (GWh) or 11%.

It edged up 0.2% to $5.30 today while Contact Energy was down 0.5% to $7.85 and Genesis Energy fell 1.1% to $2.815. Meridian Energy also fell, by 1.4% to $5.29, and Mercury NZ was down 0.3% to $5.94.

Retailer Hallenstein Glasson Holdings jumped 5.4% to $5.44 by early evening. Freightways crept up by 2.2% to $9.88 and NZ Oil & Gas jumped 9.5% to 46 cents.

ANZ’s business outlook survey for January also came out today and found business confidence had surprisingly bounced 18 points this month. This was thanks to the sting of November’s monetary policy statement (MPS) starting to fade.

BNZ was feeling in a poetic mood with its observations of the survey after it came out, commenting that “growth is shot” but “inflation is not”.

BNZ's head of research, Stephen Toplis, added that the survey supported the view that the economy was going to struggle over the next year or so. 

“It would have been heroic to think it would do anything else,” he wrote. “But what will have come as a surprise to many is that the overall state of pessimism in the business sector was reduced.”

ANZ Group ended the day up 1.2% to $27.20.

Kiwi Property Group lost some of its gains from earlier in the week and was down 2.1% to 94 cents. Vector wasn’t far behind, down 2% to $4.37, and Pacific Edge fell 3.1% to 47.5 cents.

Today, the NZ dollar was at 65.05 US cents by 3pm in Wellington, up from 64.80 cents at the same time yesterday.

This article has been corrected to specify Eroad’s correct end of day share price.