December 20 (SeeNews) - The indices of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) rose on Thursday, except for the BET-FI index, tracking Romania’s five regional investment funds, the SIFs, which dropped by more than three percent, brokers said.
The Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) blue-chip BET index gained 0.26% to 9,544.76. The BET-C index rose 0.53% to 6,518.64 and the ROTX index of Romania's 11 most liquid stocks, a joint index of the BVB and the Vienna Stock Exchange, added 0.58% to 21,242.66. The BET-FI was the only loser, slumping by 3.28% to 77,467.90.
"The trading was very active and we observed that the indices followed different directions, I mean that the BET goes up, but BET-FI is going down. The same thing happened yesterday," one broker told SeeNews.
“So it’s obvious that the SIFs did not continue the trend of the recent gains, which were pretty strong and after the Transgaz IPO closed investors expected that the liquidity would be oriented towards the SIFs but it turned out the other way round.”
“It could be because of the heavy trading with Transgaz allocation rights on Wednesday, their first day on the bourse,” the broker said.
The allotment rights attached to the shares in the initial public offering (IPO) of Romanian gas transmission company Transgaz ended their second day of bourse trading at 308 lei, up 4.48% from Wednesday’s closing, generating a turnover of 18.8 million lei. The rights made big gains on Wednesday, creating turnover of 47 million lei.
This is the first time that allotment rights have been traded in Romania. Such trading is meant to close the gap between subscription in an IPO and the start of trade. Up until now, investors have had to wait for weeks for regulatory approval to start trading in the shares they bought in an IPO. In the Transgaz IPO investors received one allotment right for each share they bought.
The IPO of 10% of majority state-owned Transgaz was 28 times oversubscribed, with the total value of placed orders exceeding 6.3 billion lei. The company issued 1,177,384 new shares at a price of 191.92 lei each, aiming to raise 226 million lei. The IPO was held between November 26 and December 7.
BVB’s turnover decreased to 77.6 million lei ($31.6 million/22.0 million euro), from 105.7 million on Wednesday. Its overall traded share volume, however, rose to 56.7 million from 30.8 million on the previous day.
SIF 5 Oltenia closed down 2.05% at 4.29 lei in turnover of 12.2 million lei, making it the most heavily traded stock in regular trading. SIF 2 Moldova ended down 1.43% at 3.45 lei in the second highest turnover of 8.4 million lei. SIF 4 Muntenia dropped 3.69% at 2.35 lei in the third largest turnover of 9.2 million lei.
SIF 3 Transilvania was the biggest loser among the five SIFs, slumping 5.35% to 2.3 lei in 5.4 million lei turnover.
Oil and gas group Petrom gained 1.98% to 0.515 lei in 7.1 million lei of turnover as the most traded blue chip. Blue-chip BRD bank followed in terms of turnover, gaining 1.4% to 26.6 lei in 6.3 million lei turnover. The other blue-chip bank, Banca Transilvania, closed unchanged at 0.90 lei in turnover of 4.1 million lei.
Rasdaq-C, the composite index of the RASDAQ over-the-counter market, edged down 0.13% to 4,510.87 points. Turnover on the RASDAQ market doubled to 21 million lei.
(1 euro = 3.519 Romanian lei)