Turkey's Borsa Istanbul down at opening

By Dilara Zengin

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's benchmark index started the day with a 939.14-point decrease to open at 89,242.59 on Wednesday.

On the third transaction day of the week, the BIST 100 index declined by 1.04 percent.

The banking and holding sector indices went down 2.42 percent and 0.35 percent, respectively.

A decline in state lender Halkbank's shares by 10.6 percent led to a loss in the banking sector index value of over two percent. Halkbank was in the five most-traded stocks with an increase of 5.24 percent at Tuesday's close.

Among all sectors, the tourism sector index was the best performer -- up 0.31 percent -- while the banking index started Wednesday as the worst performer.

In Tuesday's closing session, the benchmark index increased 486.67 points or 0.54 percent to 90,181.73 with a total trading volume of 3.5 billion Turkish liras ($965 million).

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate rose to 3.6450 at 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Wednesday, compared with 3.6210 at Tuesday's close.

On Wednesday, there will be no major local data announcements.