Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at open

By Gokhan Ergocun

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange rose 0.51 percent, or 583.05 points, to open at 116,033.32 points on Tuesday.

On the second transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices rose 0.70 percent and 0.47 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the leasing, factoring sector index posting the best performance, up 0.88 percent, while the insurance sector index was the worst, down 0.19 percent.

On Monday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 115,450.26, down 1.51 percent, or 1,766.02 points, with a 4.86-billion-Turkish lira ($1.23 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange dropped to 3.9380 as of 09.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Tuesday. It was 3.9450 at Monday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate stood at 4.8620 on Tuesday, compared to 4.8610 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil rose $66.53 per barrel as of 10.00 a.m. local time (0700GMT) Tuesday, compared to $65.94 on Monday.

Turkey's consumer confidence index decreased by 1.3 to 71.3 percent in March compared to February, Turkish Statistical Institute announced Tuesday.