KUALA LUMPUR – Bursa Malaysia opened lower today due to profit-taking activities in selected heavyweights in tandem with the mixed performance on Wall Street overnight.
At 9.05am, the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI shed 8.13 points to 1,621.05 from yesterday’s close of 1,629.18.
The barometer index opened 4.22 points weaker at 1,624.96.
On the broader market, losers outnumbered gainers 463 to 128, with 306 counters unchanged, 1,509 untraded and 10 others suspended.
Turnover was 332.60 million shares worth RM203.65 million.
Malacca Securities Sdn Bhd said the sentiment on Wall Street was mixed despite better-than- expected results from American chipmaker Nvidia, better-than-expected manufacturing and services PMI data as well as softer-than-expected new home sales.
“Given the mixed trading on Wall Street, and coupled with weaker quarter-on-quarter results on the local corporate scene recently, we expect profit-taking to emerge on the local exchange,” it said in a note today.
With the solid uptrend tone on Nvidia, the brokerage firm expects the buying interest to spill over towards stocks on the local front, specifically the technology sector, coupled with the data centre-related stocks.
Back home, heavyweights Maybank and Tenaga Nasional lost four sen to RM9.95 and RM13.06, respectively, Public Bank fell two sen to RM4.18, CIMB slipped three sen to RM6.85, while Petronas Chemicals added four sen to RM6.96.
As for the actives, AHB Holdings and Sapura Energy were unchanged at 17 sen and 4.5 sen, respectively, Sime Darby Property gained 10 sen to RM1.26, Velesto firmed half-a-sen to 30 sen and Fajarbaru rose five sen to 43.5 sen.
On the index board, the FBM Emas Index slipped 68.17 points to 12,351.36, the FBMT 100 Index shrank 66.00 points to 11,946.67, the FBM 70 Index dipped 122.67 points to 17,733.76, the FBM ACE Index weakened 16.54 points to 5,502.58 and the FBM Emas Shariah Index decreased 43.78 points to 12,622.39.
Sector-wise, the financial services index went down 57.04 points to 17,704.22, the energy index declined by 4.64 points to 999.32, the industrial products and services index slid 0.51 of-a-point to 196.94 but the plantation index inched up by 2.38 points to 7,300.00. – May 24, 2024