Turkey Wake-up call: Macro, Political and Equity News, 12th May

BIST lost 1.10% yesterday as the sour sentiment abroad weighed on Turkish stocks and put an end to the four-day winning streak in the benchmark index. Banks underperformed with the 1.70% drop in their sector gauge as heavyweights AKBNK and GARAN reversed some of their recent gains. CCOLA, AEFES, TURSG, MAVI, IPEKE, KARSN, and ALARK were among the fewer gainers while EREGL, EKGYO, PGSUS, ARCLK, TTRAK, BRISA, OTKAR, and TKFEN topped the non-bank decliners. Today, our local macro agenda only involves TurkStat's residential sales data for April’21 due at 10AM local time. Home sales had increased 2.4% yoy to 111k units in March as the base effect from last year's first coronavirus lockdowns kicked in while rising interest rates led to a 49.7% yoy decline in mortgage-backed transactions. BIST is headed for a slight lower start given prevailing risk-off mood in global markets. U.S. futures are down almost 0.4% in early trades and Asian indices are mostly trading in the red. To remind, BIST will be trading only half a day today before being closed until Monday morning for the religious Eid holiday. Accordingly, continuous trading will stop at 12:30PM local time, followed by a closing auction where the uncrossing will take place at 12:35PM and trades at closing price will be executed between 12:38-12:40PM.