KUALA LUMPUR: A raft of corporate earnings results are expected for this week, sending investors to the sidelines of Bursa Malaysia after days of subdued trading.

       At 9.05am, the FBM KLCI was down 2.24 points to 1,523.3, reflecting the lack of buying momentum to push away from recent lows.

       "In the absence of fresh buying catalysts, investors will probably be tempted to sell rather than buy shares on the Malaysian bourse at this juncture," said Kenanga Research in its weekly technical report.

       "This suggests that the benchmark FBMKLCI – following the appearance of negative technical signals triggered by the 2-line simple moving average crossover and the decelerating Parabolic SAR trend – is expected to face a test of resilience again," it added.

       Kenanga Research has pegged the FBM KLCI's immediate support at 1,510, a break of which may cause the index to drift towards the next support threshold of 1,475.

       Among individual counters, AirAsia is seeing some selling pressure ahead of its scheduled earnings result later today.

       The low-budget airline fell four sen to RM1.01 on the back of 47.49 million shares exchanging hands, making it one of the most active counters in early trading.

       Petronas Gas, which is also expected to see its earnings results later today, rose 12 sen to RM16.48. However, Petronas Chemicals, whose results are scheduled for release as well, dropped two sen to RM8.30.

       Meanwhile, bank counters were mostly higher, led by Maybank climbing four sne to RM8.12. Public Bank was up one sen to RM4.08, CIMB gained three sen to RM5.13 but Hong Leong Bank shaved eight sen to RM18.24.

       IHH Healthcare also took an early lead, rising seven sen to RM6.61.

       The top traded counters were Tanco unchanged at 27 sen , Metronic down 0.5 sen to two sen and Scope falling 1.5 sen to 38.5 sen.