KUALA LUMPUR: Markets are expected to be slow on this Chirstmas eve trading day, with the overnight close of the key Wall Street indices fairly flat between 0.75% and 0.01%.
A HwangDBS Vickers report said investors still at work watching share prices on Thursday, Dec 24 "would probably feel lonely today in view of the silent market environment".
The broking house expects a low volume of about 400 million shares to be traded ahead of the long weekend and global year-end holidays.
According to HwangDBS, amid the light trading activity, FBM KLCI is expected to show a marginal positive bias following its sluggish performance of late.
"Leading the way today could be property counters as sentiment should turn up a bit after the government changed its mind to impose a real property gains tax (RPGT) of 5% only for PROPERTIES [] sold within five years of purchase (instead of a similar RPGT tax being applicable for property transactions of all holding periods)," said the broker.
At 9.45am market volume was at 54.5 million shares valued at RM40.8 million, and gainers outnumber losers three to two. Compugates was the most active, unchanged at 6.5 sen. Top gainer was enameled copper wire maker Ta Win Holdings up 27.5 sen to 80 sen while top loser was furniture maker Latitude Tree Holdings down 32 sen to RM1.56.
The FBM KLCI is largely unchanged, up 0.44 points or 0.03% to 1,260.97 with heavyweight gainers being Genting up 3 sen to RM7.30, CIMB up 2 sen to RM12.84, MMC up 3 sen to RM2.39 and heavyweight losers being IOI Corp down 2 sen to RM5.39, Maybank down 1 sen to RM6.76 and PLUS down 1 sen to RM3.24.
At 10am, strong commodity prices were pushing Japan's Nikkei 225 unexpectedly higher up 1.29% to 10,512.17, China's Shanghai Composite Index was up 0.33% to 3,083.86 but Singapore's Straits Times Index was lower 0.17% to 2,836.72 points