Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at opening session

By Gokhan Ergocun

ISTANBUL (AA) - Turkey's benchmark stock index started the day at 118,714.00 points on Thursday, up 0.54%, or 634.09 points.

At Wednesday's close, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 index was slightly up by 0.03% at 118,079.91 points with a daily trading volume of 23.5 billion Turkish liras ($3.4 billion).

The US dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate, meanwhile, dropped to 6.8460 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT), compared to 6.8520 at previous close.

The euro/Turkish lira exchange rate also decreased to 7.8200 from 7.9320, while British pound traded for 8.6230 Turkish liras, down from 8.7330.

One barrel of Brent crude oil sold for around $44.50 as of 10 a.m. local time (0700GMT).

Later in the day, Turkey's central bank will hold its seventh Monetary Policy Committee meeting of the year to decide on policy rate.