Turkey Wake-up call: Macro, Political and Equity News, 25th January

BIST lost 0.59% on Friday along with global peers, but still managed to pocket a 1.18% gain for the whole week. Benchmark BIST100 opened flat on Friday and its attempts to tick up were quashed and the market spent almost all of the day in negative territory. Banks visibly underperformed with the 2.26% drop in their sector index amid pressure on ISCTR, AKBNK, and GARAN. CCOLA, OTKAR, ALKIM, TSKB, ARCLK, ALARK, AYGAZ, and CIMSA were among the gainers for the day while steelmakers, MGROS, DOAS, ZOREN, SELEC, MPARK, and FROTO topped the longer list of decliners. S&P affirmed its unsolicited rating for Turkey at B+ while also maintaining the outlook at Stable after its scheduled review on Friday evening, as was broadly anticipated. Coming to this morning, our local macro agenda presents January'21 Manufacturing Capacity Utilization Rate (CUR stood at 75.6% in December'20 and was 75.5% back in January'20) and Real Sector Confidence index (was at 106.8 in December'20 and had stood at 104.1 back in January'20) both to be released at 10AM local time. Sentiment in peer markets has swung back into positive and therefore, we predict an uptick start for the BIST. U.S. futures are up 0.4% and Asian equity indices are almost all trading in the green.