Turkish stocks down at close

By Muhammed Ali Gurtas

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey’s benchmark index closed the day with a 200.24-point drop to 87,881.97 points Wednesday.

The BIST 100 index fell by 0.23 percent with a total trading volume of 4.7 billion Turkish liras (approximately $1.27 billion).

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate increased to 3.6970 as of 5 p.m. (1400GMT) Wednesday, continued to stand at just below the 3.70 level. One U.S. dollar was worth 3.6490 liras at Tuesday's closing session.

On the third day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices decreased by 0.92 and 0.36 percent, respectively. Among all sectors, the trade index was the best performer --2.61 percent rise-- while the insurance sector fell the most with a 1.74 percent drop.

The most heavily-traded stocks were lenders Garanti and Halkbank, the country's national flag carrier Turkish Airlines, followed by other private lenders Akbank and Yapi Kredi.

Shares of Tat Gida, which operates in the food industry under Turkish conglomerate Koc Holding, were the top gainers of the day, rising 6.26 percent.

Selcuk Ecza Deposu, a pharmaceutical warehouse, suffered the largest decline of the day as its shares dropped by 4.92 percent.

The Borsa Istanbul Gold Exchange index decreased by 0.21 percent while gold was trading at 144,500 Turkish liras (around $39,087) per kilogram as of 4.30 p.m. (1330GMT).

On Wednesday, Turkey's finance minister said that the government ran a budget surplus of 11.4 billion Turkish liras (approximately $3.06 billion) in January.

Official data showed Turkish government revenues in January stood at 58.8 billion Turkish liras (some $15.8 billion), a 25.8 percent increase year-on-year, while budget expenditures in the same month also rose to 47.3 billion liras (around $12.7 billion) in line with the year-end targets, an 11.3 percent rise from a year earlier.

The Turkish Statistical Institute announced Wednesday that Turkey's unemployment rate reached to 12.1 percent with a 0.3 percentage point increase in November 2016 compared to the previous month.

The number of employed people was 27.07 million, up 391,000 from a year earlier, showing the Turkish economy kept creating jobs at significant clip but failed to keep pace with the growing number of people seeking jobs.