MOSCOW, August 18 (Itar-Tass) —— Russian trading floors slumped before Thursday closing. MICEX fell by 3.73 percent to 1,452.83 points, and the RTS index, by 4.79 percent to 1,584.20 points.
Blue chips also showed a negative trend. The leaders of the fall today were Sberbank (- 6.27 percent), Severstal (- 6.05 percent), VTB (- 5.92 percent), Surgutneftegaz (- 5.16 percent) and Rosneft (- 4 percent).
As Nord Capital analyst Vladimir Rozhankovsky said, such a significant drop in stock indexes follows the publication of the American business activity index FRB Philadelphia.
“When we saw the index value, at first we thought it was some mistake – the drop was by 30.7 percent. This value was observed last time in the acute phase of the crisis in 2008,” he said, adding that quotations fell under psychological pressures.
The Russian stock market has been on the decline since the morning. In the first minutes of trading the RTS index fell by 1.65 percent to 1,636.48 points and by 10:30 Moscow time the drop was 1.69 percent. The MICEX index also fell at the opening by 1.47 percent. Due to a technical failure on MICEX (at 16:11 Moscow time) trading was temporarily suspended.
“The situation on world markets looks pessimistic, we are expecting a negative opening on Friday, before the markets try to turn up, having reached this week’s lows,” said the senior analyst of Zerich Capital Management, Oleg Dushin.
The stock market was in turmoil today. Experts name no exact cause, but in general they suspect that it is a belated response to the loss of trust in economic regulators.