KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia's benchmark stock index backed further away from the 1,500-point level after having fallen through the support in the previous day's trading.
At 12.30pm, the FBM KLCI was down 4.54 points to 1,489.33 on the back of market trading volume of 2.9 billion shares valued at RM1.55bil.
The market breadth remained deeply negative with 723 decliners compared to 225 gainers.
Leading the blue chips lower, PETRONAS Chemicals was down eight sen to RM6.80 while Press Metal
slumped 12 sen to RM4.88.
Tenaga Nasional slid 10 sen to RM10.36, IHH shed five sen to RM5.95 and MISC lost six sen to RM7.29.
The top traded share on the market was Leform, diving nine sen to 18 sen on the back of 294.1 million shares exchanging hands.
SCIB, the day's second most traded, continued its rout, hitting limit down for a second straight day after losing 30 sen to 53.5 sen with 199.4 million shares done.
The global risk appetite for equities has plummeted in recent days following remarks from US policymakers that indicated there may still be a ways to go before rate cuts began.
Meanwhile, economic data coming out of China suggested a slower-than-anticipated recovery, which dragged on stock prices.
The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.6% to 2,875 while the blue-chop CSI200 slid 0.7% to 3,276.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng was the worst-performing of the key Asian markets, diving 2.8% to 15,419.
