Bucharest Stocks Open Slightly Down, Eyes On Fondul Proprietatea

10.21.2013 By Bogdan Neagu

The Bucharest stock exchange traded slightly down Monday morning, with a few stocks drawing investors’ attention, as most of them expect the start of Romgaz’s public offering tomorrow.

Romgaz plans to sell 15% of its stock in an initial public offering that will run between October 22 and October 31. The government has set a price range of 24 to 32 lei (EUR5.4 to EUR7.2) a share for Romgaz's initial public offering of shares and global depository receipts (GDRs) to be traded in Bucharest and London, respectively, thus the total offering is expected to fetch between RON1.38 billion and RON1.85 bilion.

At around 10:40 local time (GMT0740), the Bucharest market’s BET index was down 0.16% from Friday closing level, while composite index BET-C traded down 0.14%.

BET-FI, which tracks Fondul Proprietatea (FP.RO) and the five regional investment funds (SIFs), was down 0.58%, while Bucharest benchmark index BET-BK was losing 0.29%.

Energy stocks tracker BET-NG was down 0.26%.

The bourse’s traded value reached RON3.1 million (EUR0.7 million), with half of the amount coming from Fondul Proprietatea trades, and almost RON1 million in Erste Bank Group (EBS.RO) share transactions. Proprietatea was losing 0.4%, but Erste was up 0.7%. (EUR1=RON4.4514)