Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at open

By Gokhan Ergocun

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange rose 0.46 percent, or 491.02 points, to open at 107,892.39 points on Thursday.

On the fourth transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices rose 0.66 percent and 0.46 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the wood paper printing sector index posted the best performance, up 1 percent, while the leasing factoring sector index suffered the worst decrease, down 2.91 percent.

On Wednesday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 107,401.38, down 2.41 percent, or 2,657.24 points, with a 8-billion-Turkish lira ($1.9 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange dropped to 4.0770 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Thursday. It was 4.0940 at Wednesday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate also decreased to 4.9690 by market open -- from 4.9920 at the previous close -- and one British pound traded for 5.6970 Turkish liras versus 5.7100 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil rose $74.29 per barrel as of 10.00 a.m. local time (0700GMT) Thursday, compared to $73.63 on Wednesday.

Turkey's Central Bank on Wednesday announced its policy rate -- the one-week repo rate -- (8 percent), marginal funding (9.25 percent) and overnight borrowing (7.25 percent) rates were held unchanged. The bank's late liquidity window interest rates was changed, as borrowing rate was kept at 0 percent while the lending rate was increased from 12.75 percent to 13.50 percent.