KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 4): The FBM KLCI closes in the red today — weighed by declining blue chips.

At 5pm, the benchmark index settled at 1,723.73, down 20.46 points or 1.17%, pressured by some of the same blue chips that lifted the index before the closing bell yesterday.

UMW Holdings Bhd, which was the top gainer yesterday, became the top loser across Bursa Malaysia today after losing 64 sen or 5.97% to close at RM10.08.

The second top loser was Maxis Bhd, which fell 61 sen or 8.47% to RM6.59.

A remisier who declined to be named told theedgemarkets.com that the eleventh hour gain on Monday’s trading was possibly arranged by certain quarters and was not reflective of the true performance of the market.

“There are no positive catalysts to push the index (KLCI). The ringgit has weakened further as well, so it came back to normal today. It would be capped below 1,740 for the next few days,” he said.

Across the market, some 1.34 billion shares worth RM1.53 billion were traded. Losers outpace gainers at 549 stocks to 260 stocks, while 300 counters remained unchanged.

Top gainers were led by MISC Bhd — its share price closed 42 sen or 5.4% higher at RM8.20, after the group released its second quarter ended June 30, 2015 (2QFY15) financial result.

MISC 2QFY15 net profit rose 2.5 times to RM745.2 million from RM288.08 million, while revenue advanced 2.4% to RM2.6 billion from RM2.54 billion.

The most active counter was The Media Shoppe Bhd, which saw 45.51 million shares change hands.

Across the region, Japan’s Nikkei fell 0.14%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.02%, while South Korea’s Kospi increased by 0.97%.

Reuters reported that Asian shares struggled to stay positive on Tuesday after downbeat economic data pressured Wall Street ahead of a key US jobs report that could provide important clues to the timing of the Federal Reserve's interest rate increase.

At the time of writing, the ringgit also weakened further to RM3.8523 against the US dollar, and to RM2.7995 against the Singapore dollar.