KUALA LUMPUR: Blue chips opened on a cautious note on Tuesday, Feb 23, as investors were uninspired by the closing on Wall Street, despite the better local corporate earnings.

At 9.42am, the FBM KLCI was down 2.57 points to 1,263.87. Turnover was 119 million shares valued at RM68.37 million. There were 145 gainers, 117 losers and 130 stocks unchanged.

HwangDBS Vickers Research said after chalking up a cumulative gain of 32.6-point or 2.6% over the past seven market days, it reckoned the benchmark FBM KLCI will probably pause for a breather today.

“Technically, it will want to tread above the immediate support level of 1,255 ahead. This is also the case on Wall Street, as key U.S. equity barometers slipped marginally by between 0.1% and 0.2% at the closing bell last night,” it said.

HwangDBS Vickers Research said with most of the results released yesterday evening – such as Telekom Malaysia and Malaysian Airline System – coming in broadly within expectations, investors would be watching out for the next batch of earnings reports (from the likes of CIMB, Axiata and Plus) to be announced later today as heaps of listed companies rush to reveal their financial performance records for the Oct – Dec 09 quarter by this Thursday.

At Bursa Malaysia, BAT fell eight sen to RM41.52, OCB seven sen to 58 sen and Mudajaya shed six sen to RM5.30.

IOI Corp shed five sen to RM5.30, TM and CIMB shed four sen each to RM3.31 and RM12.56.

However, United Plantations advanced 16 sen to RM13.50, Supermax 15 sen to RM5.90 and Kossan 12 sen to RM6.80.