November 19 (SeeNews) - The Romanian stock market lost further ground on Monday, with trading dominated by the country’s regionally-defined investment funds, the SIFs, brokers said.
The Bucharest Stock Exchange's (BVB) blue-chip BET index dropped 0.74% to 9,028.14 points. The composite BET-C index lost 0.38% to 6,309.25 points and the BET-FI, which tracks the SIFs, fell 0.96% to 70,820.46 points. The ROTX index of Romania's nine most liquid stocks, a joint index of the BVB and the Vienna Stock Exchange, slipped 0.40% to 20,037.95 points.
Stock turnover on the BVB fell to 37 million lei ($15.5 million/10.6 million euro) from 56.8 million lei on Friday. BVB's overall volume rose slightly to 36 million shares.
“The trading session was like in the past days, with slim falls," one broker told SeeNews. "It’s possible to witness more of this type of trading in the upcoming days. So far, there are no prerequisites for an upward trend."
Upon the start of trading, the market was on the rise because of positive signals on the international markets on Friday but then again it lost ground as investors stay back, the broker added.
SIF 5 Oltenia was the most heavily traded stock in regular trading on the BVB on Monday, losing 0.75% to 3.95 lei in a turnover of seven million lei. SIF 2 Moldova ended 2.15% down at 3.18 lei in the second highest turnover of the day of 4.3 million lei. SIF 4 Muntenia closed dowm 2.34% at 2.09 lei in the day's third largest turnover of 4.2 million lei.
SIF 3 Transilvania was the only SIF to gain ground, ending 0.95% to 2.12 lei in four million lei turnover. The five SIFs accounted for 62% of BVB’s total turnover.
Blue-chip Impact Contractor & Developer lost 7.22% to 0.9 lei, generating a turnover of 1.8 million lei. “There was selling of Impact shares probably because most investors do not want to participate in the share capital increase. They consider it’s better to save money for the Transgaz IPO,” the broker said. The company said earlier it planned to raise its share capital by 85.1 million lei to 200 million lei via a bonus issue
Romania's state-owned gas transmission company Transgaz will hold an initial public offering (IPO) of 10% of its shares on the BVB between November 26 and December 7.
Oil and gas group Petrom added 0.2% to 0.496 lei in two million lei turnover. Blue-chip bank, Banca Transilvania, shed 0.59% to 0.845 lei in 3.2 million lei of turnover.
Rasdaq-C, the composite index of the over-the-counter market RASDAQ, went down 1.09% to 4,415.09. Turnover on the RASDAQ market fell to 5.7 million lei on Monday from 8.7 million lei on Friday.
Construction company Cominco was the most traded stock on the RASDAQ on Monday, closing down 0.56% at 88.5 lei in turnover of 689,000 lei.
(1 euro = 3.4819 Romanian lei)