PRAGUE/BUDAPEST/WARSCHAU (dpa-AFX) – The stock exchanges in Eastern Europe ended trading on Thursday without a clear direction. Prague and Budapest posted gains while Warsaw fell. The stock exchange in Moscow closed only slightly changed.
The leading Czech index PX (PX Prague Stock Exchange Index) expanded its previous day’s plus and rose by 0.55 percent to 1231.89 points. The market had expected the Czech central bank to leave its key interest rates unchanged.
Among the heavily weighted individual stocks, the shares of the Austrian Erste Group (Erste Group Bank) rose by 1.5 percent. Moneta Money Bank and Komercni Banka (Komercni Banka AS) shares gained a little less than half a percent.
In Budapest, the BUX rose 0.94 percent to 43,332.83 points. laktie MOL posted strong growth of 2.2 percent. Bank OTP shares rose 1.5 percent. MTelekom (Magyar Telekom Telecommunications), on the other hand, lost 1.3 percent and the pharmaceutical paper Richter Gedeon (Chemical Works of Richter Gedeon) lost 0.6 percent.
The Warsaw Wig-20 fell by 0.81 percent to 1674.37 points, and the market-wide Wig lost 0.89 percent to 54,351.82 points. In Poland, the two banks ING Bank Slaski and Bank Pekao opened their books. The quarterly profits presented clearly disappointed the expectations of the market experts. ING Bank Slaski shares are down more than 5.5 percent. Pekao fell 4.8 percent.
The Moscow stock market hardly moved: The Russian RTS index (RTS) closed with a slight minus of 0.11 percent at 1104.77 points./sto/APA/ck/he