Russian stocks increase on lack of strong cues, flat oil

MOSCOW, Mar 21 (PRIME) -- The Russian stock market edged up on Tuesday amid the lack of drivers and oil trading flat during the day, analysts said.

The MICEX grew 0.26% to 2,048.07 and the RTS rose 0.02% to 1,121.63.

“The market was seen in the green territory with lower volumes in early trade. The lack of major events resulted in a decline in investor activity,” Otkritie Broker analyst Andrei Kochetkov said.

He added that there were very few events on the oil market, too.

“The quotations have stabilized due to… OPEC’s growing willingness to prolong an output cut agreement. However, crude prices will soon be challenged by another U.S. oil stocks statistics from the American Petroleum Institute,” the expert said.

Finam analyst Timur Nigmatullin said that the external environment was positive during the day with the major European benchmarks demonstrating gains.

Some power companies were among the best gainers: Territorial Generating Company-1 (TGC-1) soared 3.35% to 0.015 rubles and Russian Grids increased 1.46% to 0.978 rubles.

However, power producer Unipro fell 2.19% to 2.685 rubles after it reported a 33% decline in RAS net profit to 10.5 billion rubles in 2016.

Preferred shares of oil company Transneft added 3.44% to 195,500 rubles supported by the 2016 IFRS report marking a 62% rise in net profit to almost 233 billion rubles.

Below are the MICEX’ five most active stocks on Tuesday:

Company	Change, %	Last price, rbl	Trading volume, bln rbl
Sberbank	-0.5%	162.98	6.540
Gazprom	+0.4%	129.30	4.909
Rosneft	+1.56%	316.00	3.727
Moscow Exchange	-2.37%	114.38	1.905
Lukoil	+0.27%	3,101.00	1.717

(57.2847 rubles – U.S. $1)

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