Turkish equities and country-specific exchange traded fund are among the worst performers among developing economies, and the market continued to sink lower Tuesday after the central bank failed to instill confidence in investors.
The iShares MSCI Turkey ETF (NYSEArca: TUR) slipped 2.2% Tuesday to a new 52-week low and has declined 25.2% year-to-date.
The Turkish markets further weakened Tuesday, despite the central bank’s call to action. The national central bank published a “road map” of nine technical adjustments that Turkey would implement for normalization of the global monetary policy, but it fell short of investors’ expectations, Bloomberg reports.
“The strategic plan is disappointing,” Guillaume Tresca, a senior emerging market strategist at Credit Agricole, told Bloomberg. “The market was expecting more, and I have the impression that the central bank is just trying to justify saying to the markets that it’s ready to face a Fed rate hike, without really announcing anything new.”
Today’s decision was the central bank’s last chance to act before the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting on September 17, which many expect will reveal the first U.S. rate hike in almost a decade.
Consequently, investors dumped Turkish assets, pushing the lira down as much as 1.3% to a record 2.9066 per dollar and yields on two-year government debt to 10.68%, its highest in over a year.
TUR, though, has experienced slight inflows of $47.8 million so far this year and a little over $2 million this month, according to ETF.com, which suggests that ETF investors believe the economy can turn around or at least the market is attractive after the constant selling pressure. [Contrarians May See Opportunity in Turkey ETF]