Serious negative news from European countries tethering on bankruptcies such as Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain – increasingly becoming known by the nasty acronym ‘PIIGS, and rising labor unions’ protest moods in Germany, France and Britain as well as other pessimistic trends across the globe such as continuing poor unemployment figures, retail numbers and other crisis-related issues continued to worsen the volatility trends on the global markets in February.
Unfortunately, Russia was not spared from these negative trends, as the bad news seriously dampened the promising positive tendencies in its economy. However, unlike most foreign stock bourses, the Russian stock market indices ended the month in the green, albeit at much lower figures than expected, on the RTS.
Thus, the RTS-Aggregate Index was up 4.35% to 1423.13, RTS Standard, the new index tracking the blue chips’ performances, rose 3.92% to 9352.65, while the RTS-2, the tracker of the second-tier equities, also surged by 2.17% to 1532.05. These positive performances pushed the volume of trading to 304.03bln rubles ($10.01bln). Broken down, the top industry growth leaders were metallurgy (+5.82) and oil & gas (+5.58), while the corporate growth drivers were Gazprom (+11.59), LUKoil (+9.59) and Rosneft (8.25).
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