Bursa tracks rebound on Wall Street as lira shows recovery

KUALA LUMPUR: Bursa Malaysia showed promise in the opening minutes of Wednesday's session as it moved higher despite a continued slide in early Asian markets.

Japan's Nikkei and Australia's ASX200 had failed to pick up on the rebound on Wall Street overnight as the Turkish lira recovered some of its losses, easing fears of a contagion effect in other emerging markets.

At 9.05am, the FBM KLCI was up 1.59 points to 1,785.37. Trading volume was 99.89 million shares valued at RM45.12mil. There were 167 gainers versus 52 decliners and 179 counters unchanged.

Among actively traded counters, Foundpac snapped four sessions of gains to pull back 4.5 sen to 40 sen. Notion VTec continued its rise following yesterday's gains, adding half a sen to 75 sen.

Meanwhile, Evergreen rose three sen to 61 sen and JCY rose two sen to 33.5 sen.

Leading gainers included Litrak, putting on 10 sen to RM4.79, Hengyuan advancing 10 sen to RM7.35 and Vitrox pushing nine sen higher to RM7.74.

Some of the biggest decliners were banking heavyweights RHB Bank sliding 19 sen to RM5.15, Hong Leong Bank falling 16 sen t0 RM18.88 and Public Bank losing four sen to RM24.36.

Nestle also took a step back, sliding 70 sen to RM146.50 on the back of yesterday's earnings announcement. 

Meanwhile in oil markets, prices faced downwards pressure as the US dollar continued to grow. Brent crude futures dipped 0.5% to US$72.12 a barrel and WTI crude shed 0.4% to US$66.76 a barrel.