November 27 (SeeNews) - The Romanian stock market lost ground on Tuesday in calm trading after two days of rises, brokers said.
"In early trading the market rose a bit but then sellers came in on a large scale, probably because of the attractive prices. I doubt, however, that the sellers were the same ones who have been buying in the past few days," one broker told SeeNews. “My personal opinion is that one single investor has been selling today."
The Bucharest Stock Exchange's (BVB) blue-chip BET index fell 1.03% to 8,760.66 points. The BET-FI, which tracks the SIF regional investment funds, dropped 1.55% to 68,142.29 and the ROTX index of Romania's nine most liquid stocks, a joint index of the BVB and the Vienna Stock Exchange, shed 1.15% to 19,478.30. The composite BET-C index edged up by just 0.01% to 6,190.02.
Share turnover on the BVB fell slightly to 49.5 million lei ($20.4 million/13.7 million euro) from 50.5 million on Monday. BVB's overall volume increased to 30 million shares from 27 million. The five SIFs accounted for more than 70% of the BVB's total turnover.
SIF 1 Banat Crisana was the most heavily traded stock in regular trading, losing 1.96% to 3.0 lei in turnover of 9.3 million lei. SIF 2 Moldova shed 1.31% to 3.01 lei in the second highest turnover of seven million lei. SIF 5 Oltenia closed down 0.26% at 3.81 lei in the third largest turnover of 6.9 million lei.
BRD Bank was the most traded blue chip, falling 1.26% to 23.50 lei in 3.1 million lei of turnover. The other blue-chip bank, Banca Transilvania, lost 2.42% to 0.805 lei in 2.5 million lei turnover.
Blue-chip brokerage SSIF Broker was among the few to close up, adding 0.82% to 2.47 lei and generating 958,000 lei in turnover. Blue-chip oil refinery Rompetrol Rafinare lost 0.81% to 0.98 lei in a turnover of 756,000 lei.
"Until the Transgaz IPO is over, it’s hard to say that the market will rise significantly. We hope it will stabilise and afterwards pile up some gains,” the broker said. “I expect small falls and rises in the next two weeks.”
On Monday Romania's state-owned gas transmission company Transgaz launched an IPO of 10% of its shares, which will close on December 7. The broker said he expected the subscription rate will be 3-4 times for the small tranche, adding, “As for the bigger tranche, we will have to see how much money the big investors will have for Romania.”
Around 60% of the shares will be offered to investors that will have to subscribe for shares worth more than 500,000 lei, while the rest of the issue will be offered to small investors who will be able to subscribe for shares worth less than 500,000 lei.
Rasdaq-C, the composite index of the over-the-counter market RASDAQ, shed 0.21% to 4,365.71. Turnover on the RASDAQ market fell to 4.8 from 7.6 million lei on Monday. Gas transport firm Armax was the most traded stock on the RASDAQ, closing 1.48% higher at 0.274 lei in turnover of 573,000 lei.
(1 euro = 3.5977 Romanian lei)