Turkey's Borsa Istanbul goes down at close

By Muhammed Ali Gurtas

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey’s benchmark index closed the day with a 912.01-point decline to stand at 89,269.72 points on Wednesday.

The BIST 100 index fell by 1.01 percent with a total trading volume of 4.7 billion Turkish liras (approximately $1.29 billion).

On the third trading day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices decreased by 2.06 and 0.90 percent, respectively.

The chemicals/oil/plastics sector was the day’s best performer -- up 1.02 percent -- while the investment trusts index saw the biggest decline, falling by 3.02 percent.

The five most traded stocks were lenders Halkbank and Garanti, national flag carrier Turkish Airlines, another lender Akbank plus the country's major petrochemicals producer Petkim.

The value of state lender Halkbank's shares (HALKB) fell by 14.6 percent making it the worst performer of the day.

Trading volume of Halkbank's shares was almost 1.8 billion Turkish liras ($494.5 million), corresponding to around 40 percent of the total transaction volume on Wednesday. Halkbank was also among the five most-traded stocks with an increase of 5.24 percent at Tuesday's close.

Sabanci Holding's company KordSA (KORDS), a producer of industrial yards, single end cords and tire cord fabrics, enjoyed a 3.29 percent rise in the value of its shares, becoming the highest performer of the day.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate increased to 3.6440 liras as of 5 p.m. (1400GMT) Wednesday, compared with 3.6210 at Tuesday's close.

The dollar traded for 3.6230 liras last Friday after seeing a historic hike -- around 3.94 liras -- in mid-January.

The Borsa Istanbul Gold Exchange index declined by 0.39 percent while the price of gold per kilogram increased to 146,850 Turkish liras (around $40,347) as of 4.30 p.m. (1330GMT), compared with 146,100 Turkish liras (some $40,302) at Tuesday's close.