Turkey's Borsa Istanbul down at open

By Gokhan Ergocun

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange dropped 0.28 percent, or 319.79 points, to open at 113,809.51 points on Thursday.

On the fourth transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices rose 0.35 percent and 0.25 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the insurance sector index posted the best performance, up 1.15 percent, while the chemical petrol plastic sector index performed the worst, down 5.52 percent.

On Wednesday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 114,129.30, down 1.78 percent, or 2,067.24 points, with a 7.6-billion-Turkish lira ($1.9 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange stood at 4.0050 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Thursday. It was 4.0120 at Wednesday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate dropped to 4.9440 on Thursday, compared to 4.9600 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil rose $68.98 per barrel as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) Thursday, compared to $69.03 on Wednesday.

Turkey's GDP growth rate rose by 7.4 percent year-on-year in 2017 and 7.3 percent in the last quarter of the year, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced on Thursday.