One factor behind Thursday’s rally in US equities was an apparent stabilization of the situation in Turkey. Not only had the lira rebounded off of its lows from earlier in the week, but the ETF that tracks Turkish stocks (TUR) also bounced more than 10% off of its lows. It doesn’t look like much, but the fact that it stopped going down was good enough.
While the lira and TUR bounced, today the lira is back to its losing ways with a decline of 5% versus the dollar. In addition to that, in local currency terms, Turkish stocks haven’t stopped declining and traded to new lows yesterday. While the decline isn’t as bad in percentage terms as the dollar adjusted chart above, in order to be confident that Turkey is in fact stabilizing, we would expect to see its stock market stop declining in both dollar-adjusted as well as local currency terms. Both the chart above and below are updated through Thursday, but in early trading today, Turkish stocks are down in both local and dollar adjusted terms.
