KUALA LUMPUR: Bursa Malaysia stayed negative over the early session with 585 stocks in the red as China's market rally sapped vitality from other regional markets.
Chinese markets have surged to a two-year high on the back of anticipation that Beijing will announce more stimulus measures to spur the nation's economy and ailing stock market.
The Shanghai composite index rose 4.81% to 3,496, a level last seen in January 2022, after reopening from a week-long national holiday.
Meanwhile, the Malaysian stock market has been struggling to get its footing amid the outflow of funds to China and a weak Wall Street performance amid rising US Treasury yields.
The benchmark FBM KLCI dropped 2.6 points to 1,632.69, flirting with two month lows due to the extended profit-taking.
The market trading volume remained on pace at 1.9 billion shares valued at RM1.11bil.
Blue chips succumbing to the selling pressure included CelcomDigi down eight sen to RM3.59, MISC falling seven sen to RM7.71, PETRONAS Chemicals sliding five sen to RM5.78 and YTL Power dropping five sen to RM3.52.
Among the lower liners, Pertama Digital remained at its limit down price of 48.5 sen, while other leading laggards included UMS shedding 14 sen to RM2.15 and Petron Malaysia
losing 13 sen to RM4.43.
ACE Market debutant KHPT pared some of its earlier gains to close 2.5 sen higher at 22.5 sen.
It was the second most-active counter with 183.89 million shares done, behind Velocity, which was down 0.5 sen to 6.5 sen after 212.9 million shares changed hands.
In other Asian markets, Japan's Nikkei was down 1.19% to 38,866, Hong Kong's Hang Seng dove 5.58% to 21,810 and Singapore's Straits Times was unchanged at 3,599.
