Mainstreaming capital market performance and foreign portfolio investment in Nigeria

Incessant stock market failures and waning domestic investor’s confidence in Nigerian capital market as well as foreign portfolio investors activities have generated contentious views among capital market stakeholders necessitating critical investigations. This study employs descriptive and expo-facto research designs using time series data, judgementally sampled between 1985 and 2015 from various report issues of the NSE,SEC and National Bureau of Statistics respectively examine the connectivity among capital market liquidity, market capitalisation and foreign portfolio investment in Nigeria. Vector Granger Causality and sub VAR tests are applied and the result revealed bi-directional and unidirectional relationship among foreign portfolio investment there by rejecting the null hypotheses test of no interconnection and direction of causality among the series examined. The study therefore concludes that significant level of bilateral connection exist among the series and consequently recommends the establishment of foreign portfolio investment department by all stocking firms operating under Nigerian stock exchange market in order to adequately capture daily update of all levels of over the counter foreign and domestic investment transactions with the reports captured by the daily official list report coupled with an integrated grass root capital market investors education to boost awareness for the market activities, products and their benefits respectively Keywords: Capital market, foreign portfolio investment, stock market liquidity, capitalisation and Nigeria.