NZ stocks: Very quiet day for NZSE

6.00pm

Small ups and downs provided little excitement in a day of largely featureless post-holiday trading on the New Zealand Stock Exchange today.

The top 50 index fell 5.89 points or 0.299 per cent to 1964.44, while the top 40 index was down 7.44 points at 1929.95 in what ASB Securities' Stephen Wright described as a "mighty quiet" day.

Total turnover by value was a very modest $31.56 million.

New Zealand's increasingly shaky-looking sole rail operator Tranz Rail was up slightly today despite news of a further credit rating downgrade.

Standard & Poor's gave Tranz Rail a double notch down grade from B- to CCC -- just one notch up from a D rating, defined as "in danger of default".

Tranz Rail was up 4c to 46c at the close of trading after dropping as low as 43c following news of the credit downgrade early this afternoon.

Mr Wright said the company's modest gain was down to "lots of punters going in there... smaller speculators, you wouldn't see any institutional buyers there".

Mr Wright expected the news of Tranz Rail's further credit downgrade "to have further negative impact on the share price" over coming days.

"It will be interesting to see what sort of publicity it gets," he said.

Tranz Rail was the top stock by turnover today with 6,641,870 shares with a value of $3,106,820 changing hands.

Telecom, which remained at its opening price of 458 by the end of trading today, was today's top stock by value with $12,305,701 worth of its shares being traded.

In other trading today Sky TV was down 12c to 380 and its part-owner INL also drifted down 10c to 390 in the wake of recent news of the Australian Fairfax group's plans to purchase INL's publishing arm.

"People, whoever the sellers were -- and I stress there's not big sellers -- were not waiting around to see what happens next", Mr Wright said.

WestpacTrust rose 20c to 1640 "on the basis of Aussie prices".

Fisher & Paykel Healthcare rose 5c to 1055 while its appliance counterpart remained static on 1060.

Among stocks to rise today were; Air New Zealand up 1c to 41, AMP up 35c to 895, Baycorp up 7c to 162, Ports of Auckland up 13c to 698, Sky City up 3c to 816, Telstra up 5c to 460 and WestpacTrust up 20c to 1640.

Among stocks to fall were; Auckland Airport down 3c to 500, Carter Holt Harvey down 3c to 161, Contact Energy down 5c to 447, Fletcher Building down 3c to 329, Genesis Energy down 8c to 122.

There were 38 rises and 45 falls on 128 stocks traded.

- NZPA