Turkish stock market down at opening

By Dilara Zengin

ANKARA

Turkey's stock exchange dropped 255.43 points at the start of trading Thursday, a 0.27 percent fall as the country headed for a three-day weekend.

The banking and holding sector indices fell 0.40 percent and 0.29 percent respectively ahead of Friday’s national holiday.

Investment trusts performed best, 0.53 percent up on Wednesday’s close, while the textile/leather index saw the biggest drop, falling 1.24 percent.

At Wednesday’s close, the BIST 100 was down 436.55 points to 95,724.950 points, with a total trading volume of 6.1 billion Turkish liras ($1.7 billion).

The Turkish lira was 3.5920 to the U.S. dollar at 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) Thursday, compared with 3.5600 at Wednesday’s close.

The Turkish consumer confidence index rose 2.1 percent to 72.8 in May compared to April, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute on Thursday.