Late buying interests push Bursa M'sia to end on firm note
KUALA LUMPUR: Late buying interests in selected heavyweights, industrial product and consumer counters, pushed Bursa Malaysia to end at an intra-day high today, in line with most of the Asian bourses, dealers said.
At 5 pm, the benchmark FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI finished at 1,828.83, up 7.23 points from yesterday's close of 1,821.60. It opened 1.79 points higher at 1,823.39.
The market barometer had at one time moved to a low of 1,821.68.
Overall, the market breadth was bullish as gainers outnumbered losers by 518 to 446, while 425 counters were unchanged, 471 untraded and 35 others suspended.
Turnover, however, slipped to 3.83 billion units valued at RM3.19 billion from Thursday's 4.60 billion units valued at RM3.29 billion.
Hengyuan Refining and Petron Malaysia topped the gainers' list, rising RM2.30 and RM1.92 each to end at RM14.30 and RM13.20, respectively.
TNB and Petronas Gas climbed 22 sen and 88 sen each to RM15.82 and RM18.20, respectively, contributing 5.30 points towards the gain of the Composite Index.
A dealer said most of Asian markets were up, benefitting from China's gross domestic product growth in 2017 for the first time in seven years and was above expectation.
Of the other heavyweights, Maybank added one sen to RM9.87, Public Bank went up two sen to RM20.90 and CIMB Group was three sen higher at RM6.83.
Petronas Chemicals slipped seven sen to RM8.10.
Among actives, UMW O&G rose two sen to 36.5 sen, Sumatec advanced one sen to 10.5 sen and Sapura Energy and Sino Hua-An climbed eight sen each to 84 sen and 55 sen, respectively.
The FBM Emas Index perked 55.72 points to 13,195.82, FBMT 100 Index went up 55.82 points to 12,860.60 and the FBM Emas Shariah Index was 60.09 points better at 13,627.46.
The FBM 70 improved 88.24 points to 16,472.37 and the FBM Ace increased 29.86 points to 6,73.12.
Sector-wise, the Finance Index bagged 46.92 points to 17,236.98 and the Industrial Index added 55.37 points to 3,368.02.
The Plantation Index eased 31.18 points to 8,037.87.
The Main Market volume fell to 2.59 billion units worth RM2.96 billion from 2.87 billion units worth RM3.01 billion on Thursday.
Volume on the ACE Market narrowed to 597.76 million shares valued at RM109.16 million from yesterday's 1.25 billion shares valued at RM194.32 million.
Warrants' volume increased to 638.59 million units worth RM124.69 million from 468.18 million units worth RM67.54 million previously.
Consumer products accounted for 179.64 million shares traded on the Main Market, industrial products (574.19 million), construction (111.68 million), trade and services (1.50 billion), technology (80.01 million), infrastructure (11.58 million), SPAC (741,000), finance (60.41 million), hotels (923,700), properties (83.33 million), plantations (35.39 million), mining (1.58 million), REITs (9.06 million), and closed/fund (9,000).
The physical price of gold as at 5.00pm stood at RM163.59/g, up 13 sen from RM163.46 at 5.00pm yesterday. — Bernama