NAIROBI: Kenya's shilling closed flat on Monday after a day of volatile trading which prompted the central bank to sell dollars to support the local currency.
At 1330 GMT market close, the shilling was quoted at 102.25/35 to the dollar, unchanged from Friday's close.
One Nairobi-based trader said the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) intervened in the market when the shilling rapidly weakened to 102.60/70 and then continued intervening for "the better part of the day".
"We have a lot of dollar demand from manufacturing and energy sectors, so there is still expectation the shilling will continue to weaken" in coming days, the trader said.
The central bank said in a weekly report that it had foreign exchange reserves of $6.9 billion as of Nov. 5, up from $6.1 billion at the start of October.
"That will put the central bank in a good position to intervene if they want to protect the local unit," a dealer at a commercial bank said earlier in the day.
The shilling has recently been helped by offshore investors selling dollars to buy high-yielding government debt. T-bills yields tumbled last week. The yield on 91-day paper slid below 14 percent from nearly 20 percent a week before.
On the equity market, the NSE 20 share index rose 20.27 points, or 0.5 percent, to close at 3,892.84 points.
In the debt market, bonds worth 1.3 billion shillings ($12.7 million) were traded, compared with the previous session's 458 million shillings.
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