Russian stocks rise on Brent increase, limited by S&P move fears

MOSCOW, Jan 23 (PRIME) -- Russian stocks rose on Friday in light of the Brent positive dynamics still backed by the European Central Bank’s (ECB) recent decision to launch a quantitative easing program; the rise was limited as investors preferred to take profits ahead of the weekend in fear that Standard & Poor’s will soon downgrade the country’s rating, analysts said.

The MICEX rose 0.31% to 1,671.80 and the RTS increased 0.47% to 820.99.

“The stock market rose on the Brent price increase to over U.S. $49 per barrel and the ruble positive consolidation below 64 against the U.S. dollar,” Sergei Filchenkov, analyst at Metropol, said.

“The stock market’s growth rates slowed down by the end of the trading week as players made a decision to take profits before the weekend. It is a reasonable decision, as next week or even this weekend S&P may downgrade Russia’s credit rating to junk level and that will bring all growth of this week to naught,” Angrei Dirgin, head of Alfa-Forex’ analytical department, said.

S&P will announce a rating decision for Russia by the end of January, the agency said earlier.

Despite the Brent and ruble positive dynamics, and ECB’s recent decision to launch the quantitative easing program in March and buy 60 billion euro bonds per month until September 2016, domestic stocks remained very sensitive to market rumors concerning the Ukrainian conflict and this limited their growth as well, the analyst said.

Maya Kosyanchich, spokeswoman for E.U. Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton, said on Friday that the E.U. may tighten anti-Russian sanctions if the Ukrainian conflict escalates.

TMK rose 27.5% to 50.1 rubles after the company said its steel pipe sales rose 1.5% on the year to 4.377 million tonnes in 2014.

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

Company	Change, %	Last price, rbl	Trading volume, bln rbl
Sberbank	+0.16	64.45	10.708
Gazprom	+0.88	152.83	5.672
Lukoil	+1.03	2849.00	4.709
Surgutneftegas pref	+3.48	39.43	3.158
Norilsk Nickel	+0.13	10400.00	2.776

(65.4000 rubles – U.S. $1)

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