Turkey's Borsa Istanbul flat at open

By Tuba Sahin

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange rose 0.05 percent, or 54.49 points, to open at 100,706.76 points on Friday.

On the last transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices gained 0.27 percent and 0.04 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the sports sector index posted the best performance, up 0.76 percent, while the food and beverage sector index suffered the worst drop, down 0.35 percent.

On Thursday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 100,652.27, down 3.10 percent, or 3,216.75 points, with an 8.5 billion Turkish liras ($1.89 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange traded at 4.5630 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Friday, compared with 4.5210 at Thursday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate stood at 5.3320 by market open --up from 5.2870 at the previous close -- and one British pound traded at 6.0820 Turkish liras versus 6.0260 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil reached $77.72 per barrel as of 10.00 a.m. local time (0700GMT) Friday.