Turkey's Borsa Istanbul down at open

By Jeyhun Aliyev

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange fell 0.15 percent, or 147.50 points, to open at 95,807.30 points on Thursday.

On the fourth transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices lost 0.40 percent and 0.14 percent, respectively.

Among all sector indices, the construction sector index posted the best performance, up 0.19 percent, while the leasing factoring sector index was the only to see a decline, down 0.89 percent.

On Wednesday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 95,954.80, up 1.64 percent, or 1,546.61 points, with a trade volume of 7.5 billion Turkish liras ($1.62 billion).

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange rate rose to 4.6340 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Thursday, from 4.6010 at Wednesday's close. Last month, it hit an all-time high of 4.93.

The euro/lira exchange rate also rose to 5.3570 in the open market -- from 5.3400 at the previous close -- while one British pound traded for 6.0780 Turkish liras versus 6.0690 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil dropped to $77.20 per barrel as of 10.00 a.m. local time (0700GMT) Thursday, from $77.67 at the previous close.

The economic confidence index dropped 3.3 percent to stand at 90.4 in June, the Turkish Statistical Institute announced on Thursday.

Turkey's Central Bank announced that its international reserves -- including foreign currencies and gold -- decreased by 4.2 percent to stand at $107.3 billion as of May.