CAIRO - After eight days of rises, Egypt's benchmark index EGX30 retreated Monday by 0.91 per cent, losing 57.61 points to close at 6,305.89 points. Also the EGX70 index, for medium and small caps, declined in Monday's trading by 0.56 per cent, closing at 610.40 points. EGX100, which measures the activity of the top 100 companies operating on Egypt's Stock Exchange, moved in the same direction, down by 0.47 per cent from Sunday's session. Sixty-three of the traded stocks witnessed an appreciation in their prices, while 102 declined and another 11 remained unchanged. Shares of a value of LE849,768,000 were traded through 39,630 deals and with a total volume of 124,019,000 shares. In the meantime, US stocks bounced yesterday, building on last month's solid gains as investors focused on encouraging corporate results, including strong bank earnings out of Europe. Energy shares also boosted indexes as crude oil futures hit a near 3-month high, helped by the US dollar weakness. The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI gained 118.53 points, or 1.13 per cent, to 10,584.47. The Standard & Poor's 500 .SPX rose 12.71 points, or 1.15 per cent, to 1,114.31. The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 22.30 points, or 0.99 per cent, to 2,277. Britain's top shares also rose early yesterday, bouncing back after falls in the previous three sessions, led higher by banks as investors welcomed first-half results from heavyweight HSBC. By 08:48 GMT, the FTSE 100 .FTSE was up 101.75 points, or 1.9 per cent, at 5,359.77. The UK blue-chip index ended down 55.93 points, or 1.1 per cent, on Friday to register a 1.0 per cent fall for the week, having hit a 10-week closing high on Tuesday. But over July as a whole, the FTSE 100 index rose 6.9 per cent, its best monthly increase for exactly a year. "We had some extremely strong figures from BNP first thing this morning which has now been consolidated by what we've seen from HSBC," said Richard Hunter, head of UK equities at Hargreaves Lansdown.
