The CBN last week sold $660m in three and five-month currency forwards at an auction aimed at clearing a backlog of dollar demand.
But traders said it was not enough to satisfy the market.
“Despite rising FX reserves, it’s the amount of the FX that is supplied that matters. The parallel market, by its nature, is particularly sensitive to demand-supply imbalances, and has a tendency to overshoot,” Reuters reported, quoting the Head of Africa Research at Standard Chartered Bank, Razia Khan.
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“Supply of FX matters more than any other factor,” she added.
Traders said the CBN had been selling dollars on the official market to support the naira, but dollar shortages were causing the local currency to weaken on the black market.
The naira lost a third of its official value against the dollar in 2016 after the CBN scrapped its peg for the currency, allowing the naira to float on the interbank market, in a bid to alleviate dollar shortages
On the Bureau de Change segment, the naira closed at N399/dollar, while the pound sterling and euro closed at N617 and N527, respectively.
Traders said that the scarcity of the greenback was far from being over.
The forex exchange reserves have gained more than $2bn so far this year, rising from $25.8bn on December 30, 2016 to $28.2bn on February 2, 2017.