Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at opening

By Tuba Sahin

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's benchmark index started the day up 488.37 points on Wednesday.

On the third transaction day of the week, the BIST 100 index rose 0.50 percent to open at 97,836.00 points.

The banking and holding sector indices climbed 0.44 percent and 0.30 percent, respectively.

All the sector indices started the day up, with the sports sector index the best performer with a 1.44-percent rise.

At Tuesday's close, the BIST 100 slipped 378.32 points or 0.39 percent to 97,347.63 points, with a total trading volume of 4.4 billion Turkish liras ($1.2 billion).

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate was flat at 3.5500 at 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) Wednesday, compared with 3.5520 at Tuesday’s close.

Turkey's foreign trade deficit rose 16.7 percent year-on-year to reach at $4.9 billion in April, according to the data released by the Turkish Statistical Institute on Wednesday.

The data showed that country's exports surged 7.4 percent to stand at $12.8 billion while imports were up by almost 10 percent to $17.8 billion in the month.

Meanwhile, analysts said that investors would focus on Eurozone inflation and unemployment data and U.S. mortgage approval figure set to be released on Wednesday.