Turkey's Borsa Istanbul starts day looking up

By Gokhan Ergocun

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange rose 0.48 percent, or 488.43 points, to open at 101,354.67 points on Tuesday.

On the second transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices rose 0.77 percent and 0.39 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the tourism sector index posted the best performance, up 1.46 percent, while the food beverage sector index saw the worst drop, down 0.61 percent.

On Monday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 100,866.24, down 1.69 percent, or 1,732.98 points, with a 4.9 billion Turkish lira ($1.15 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange stood at 4.2690 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Tuesday. It was 4.2630 at Monday's close.

Last Friday the Turkish lira slipped to a historic low against the U.S. dollar, nearly 4.30.

In a move to provide liquidity amid foreign exchange fluctuations, on Monday the Turkish Central Bank lowered the upper limit for its forex maintenance facility to 45 percent from 55 percent -- to provide $2.2 billion in liquidity to banks and withdraw 6.4 billion liras in liquidity from the market.

The euro/lira exchange rate rose to 5.0930 by market open -- from 5.0790 at the previous close -- and one British pound traded for 5.7980 Turkish liras versus 5.7840 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil fell to $75.68 per barrel as of 09.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) Tuesday, compared to $76.03 on Monday.

Turkey's Treasury Undersecretariat late Tuesday is set to release central government domestic debt statistics and Treasury cash realizations for April.