Turkey Wake-up call: Macro, Political and Equity News, 11th April

BIST added another 2.06% on Friday after a day entirely spent in positive territory, carrying its weekly gains to 6.29%. Banks gained 5.41% on average and were outperformers for the second day in a row with the large private lenders leading the pack. SAHOL, ASELS, KCHOL, CANTE, AKSEN, ODAS, HEKTS, NTHOL, and ALARK topped the gainers among non-banks in the BIST100 universe while DOAS, FROTO, CCOLA, THYAO, SELEC, AKSA, and LOGO stood out among the rare decliners for the day. Coming to this morning, our local macro agenda involves February'22 Balance of Payments data due at 10AM local time. Bloomberg survey puts the monthly CA deficit at USD5.30bn vs the USD2.42bn deficit recorded for the same month of 2021. Separately, unemployment statistics for February'22 will also be released at 10AM. Seasonally-adjusted unemployment had remained unchanged from a month ago at 11.4% in January as the 43k monthly decrease in the number of employed had almost matched the 22k retreat in labour force (labour force participation was sequentially down 0.1pp to 52.6%). We foresee a slight negative open for the BIST due to the sour sentiment in global markets this morning. U.S. futures are down almost 0.7% on top of the 0.3-0.6% overnight losses after the time we left on Friday and Asian equity indices are mostly trading in the red, with particular weakness in the Chinese benchmarks.