Saudi Tadawul down but turnover improves 

(MENAFN - Arab News) Saudi equities reflected almost a repeat of previous day's flat performance yesterday, which turned negative and the day ended in red.

The Tadawul All-Share Index (TASI) shed 0.17 percent or 13.19 points to end at 7,545.28 yesterday. The index earlier touched the intra-day high at 7,581.34 points but could not break this level subsequently and closed in red territory.

All Saudi sectors performed in a mixed fashion. Indices of Multi-Investment and Retail sectors advanced over 2.71 percent and 1.2 percent respectively.

On the other hand, eight sectors ended the day with mild losses. Real Estate Development sector became the biggest loser of the day, down by 0.55 percent or 22.47 points to close at 4,057.63.

Among heavy weights, only SABIC (Saudi Basic Industries Corp.) and Kingdom Holding Co. ended in green, reflecting 0.48 percent and 0.41 percent growth respectively.

On the other worst side, Samba Financial Group slipped 1.46 percent further to close the day at SR50.75.

Tadawul volume, however, improved by 13 percent as 467.6 million shares, worth SR9.7 billion changed hands during the day, an improvement from 414.1 million shares that were traded on Monday.

Saudi Mobile Telecommunications Co. (Zain) and Atheeb Telecom continued to dominate the trading activity for the second consecutive day.

Zain with trades of over 74.6 million shares topped the volume chart and Atheeb with a turnover of SR1.3 billion topped the value chart.

Market breadth with advance-decline ratio of 0.82:1 remained slightly negative.

Saudi Advanced Industries Co. (SAIC) showed the best performance among all Saudi stocks, surging 9.83 percent for the day.