Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at open

By Tuba Sahin

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange rose 0.21 percent, or 204.47 points, to open at 99,301.48 points on Friday.

On the last transaction day of the week, the BIST banking and holding sector indices rose 0.14 percent and 0.16 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the tourism index performed the best, up 0.71 percent, while the insurance index did the worst, down 0.06 percent.

On Thursday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 index closed at 99,097.00, up 1.92 percent, with a trading volume of 7.8 billion Turkish liras (nearly $1.7 billion).

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate fell to 4.6070 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Friday. It was 4.6110 at Thursday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate slipped to 5.3960 by market open -- down from 5.4000 at the previous close -- and one British pound traded at 6.1110 Turkish liras versus 6.1120 at Thursday's close.

The price of Brent oil was $77.40 per barrel as of 10 a.m. local time (0700GMT) Friday, down from $77.39 at the previous close.