War Fear Grips Markets But Sellers Stay Home
The resilience tells an important story. Turkish retail investors — who now make up the majority of daily trading activity — have lived through enough crises to know that knee-jerk selling often costs more than sitting still. Meanwhile, institutional money on the sidelines is watching closely, neither rushing in nor racing out. That kind of standoff can look like calm, but it is really a market holding its breath.
The real question is what breaks the stalemate. If the geopolitical situation deteriorates further, the lira becomes the first pressure valve — not necessarily equities. Currency weakness would then feed into inflation expectations, complicating the central bank’s already delicate rate path. For now, the market is betting that fear stays fear and does not become fact. That bet has a limited shelf life.
💬 Levent KAYIRA Commentary
Ekonomik Gündem Analysis: I spent 15 years watching Turkish markets react to geopolitical shocks — from the 2003 Iraq War to the 2016 coup attempt. The pattern is consistent: the first 48 hours are noise, the third day tells you the truth. What we are seeing now fits that pattern almost exactly.
Borsa Istanbul’s ability to absorb war-related anxiety without a significant drawdown reflects one structural change above all else: the Turkish retail investor base has deepened dramatically. Millions of households that moved savings into equities as a hedge against inflation are not easily spooked into selling — they already made their peace with volatility when they bought in.
But here is the number that matters: foreign ownership of BIST equities sits near historic lows, around 28-30%. That means there is no large foreign bloc to trigger a cascade sell-off the way we saw in 2013 or 2018. The market is domestically anchored, which is both its shield and its ceiling.
Watch the USD/TRY closely over the next 72 hours. If it moves above resistance levels, that signals real risk-off pressure that equities cannot ignore much longer.
Kaynak: Google News Ekonomi