Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at open

By Gokhan Ergocun

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange rose 0.20 percent, or 213.56 points, to open at 107,228.70 points on Friday.

On the last transaction day of the week, the banking sector index rose 0.37 percent and the holding sector index lost 0.23 percent.

Among all sector indices, the tourism sector index posted the best performance, up 1.35 percent, while the leasing factoring sector index saw the worst drop, down 1.76 percent.

On Thursday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 107.015,13, down 0.36 percent, or 386.25 points, with a 5.8 billion Turkish lira ($1.4 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange stood at 4.0780 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Friday. It was 4.0720 at Thursday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate fell to 4.9330 by market open -- from 4.9520 at the previous close -- and one British pound traded for 5.6800 Turkish liras versus 5.7100 at the previous close.

The price of Brent oil stood at $74.47 per barrel as of 09.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) Friday, compared to $74.78 on Thursday.

The economic confidence index in Turkey slipped month-on-month in April, falling 2 percent to 98.3, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) said on Friday.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Central Bank’s official reserve assets dropped 3.7 percent to $110.3 billion in March, the bank said on Friday.