November 23 (SeeNews) - The Romanian stock market bounced back on Friday after five consecutive days of losses as buyers reappeared, brokers said.
"It was minus two percent by midday and then the indices reversed very strongly. Investors thought the minimum level had been reached and they started buying very aggressively," one broker told SeeNews. “Investors believe it could be the start of a reverse in the trend to upwards, but until the Transgaz IPO is over, it’s not quite sure.”
Romania's state-owned gas transmission company Transgaz will hold an IPO of 10% of its shares between November 26 and December 7. The broker expects the IPO to be oversubscribed around five times.
The Bucharest Stock Exchange's (BVB) blue-chip BET index rose 1.97% to 8,733.35 points. The composite BET-C index gained 2.43% to 6,076.01 and the BET-FI, which tracks the SIF regional investment funds, added 1.85% to 66,861.08. The ROTX index of Romania's nine most liquid stocks, a joint index of the BVB and the Vienna Stock Exchange, advanced 1.73% to 19,492.59.
Share turnover on the BVB fell to 55.9 million lei ($23 million/15.4 million euro) from 66 million on Thursday. BVB's overall volume decreased to 41 million shares from 74 million on the previous day. The five SIFs dominated trading, accounting for 71% of the BVB's total turnover.
SIF 5 Oltenia was the most heavily traded stock in regular trading, adding 1.65% to 3.70 lei in a turnover of 12.6 million lei. SIF 2 Moldova ended unchanged at 2.90 lei in the second highest turnover of 9.8 million lei. SIF 4 Muntenia closed up 2.03% at 2.01 lei in the third largest turnover of 6.8 million lei.
Banca Transilvania was the most traded blue chip on Friday, adding 0.62% to 0.815 lei in 5.3 million lei of turnover. Blue-chip oil and gas group Petrom gained 1.01% to 0.50 lei in a turnover of 2.2 million lei and oil refinery Rompetrol Rafinare 4.76% to 0.099 lei in 843,000 lei of turnover. The other blue-chip bank, BRD, advanced 3.6% to 23 lei in 1.9 million lei turnover.
Rasdaq-C, the composite index of the over-the-counter market RASDAQ, gained 1.49% to 4,271.63. Turnover on the RASDAQ market fell to 3.8 million lei on Friday from 13 million on Thursday. Gas transport firm Armax was the most traded stock on the RASDAQ, closing 8.51% higher at 0.255 lei in turnover of 474,000 lei.
(1 euro = 3.6252 Romanian lei)