KUALA LUMPUR, July 26 — Bursa Malaysia remained positive during lunch break on mild buying support from blue chips amid weaker regional sentiments, dealers said.

At 12.30pm, the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI (FBM KLCI) stood at 1,809.46, up 1.04 points, after moving between 1,805 and 1,811.65 points throughout the morning session.

The benchmark index, which opened lower by 2.21 points this morning, managed to reverse its losses 30 minutes after trading started.

HwangDBS Vickers Research said regional equities are expected to be wobbly in view of concerns over the premature tapering of the quantitative easing programme by the US Federal Reserve.

“Essentially, sentiment in Asia may still be restrained although leading stock indices on Wall Street ended up between 0.1 per cent and 0.7 per cent last night,” it said.

Back home, the Finance Index was 3.27 points higher at 17,378.12, Plantation Index gained 1.90 points to 8,414.1 and the Industrial Index advanced 8.41 points to 3,079.22.

The FBM Emas Index gained 5.29 points to 12,610.75, the FBMT100 added 6.76 points to 12,349.51, FBM 70 Index garnered 6.56 points to 14,521.77 and the FBM ACE Index rose 20.14 points to 5,067.72.

Losers led gainers 344 to 244, with 317 counters unchanged, 694 untraded and 19 others suspended.

Volume was thin with 547.740 million shares traded worth RM618.617 million.

Among actives, Luster Industries and Minetech Resources each inched up half a sen to 10.5 sen and 17.5 sen, respectively, Tanjung Offshore added three sen to 68.5 sen while Astral Supreme was flat at 21 sen.  

Heavyweights, Maybank, CIMB, Sime Darby and Maxis eased two sen each to RM10.70, RM8.54, RM9.52 and RM7.08, respectively, but Axiata Group earned one sen to RM6.84. — Bernama