"We will close today at noon due to a lack of volume and literally negligible numbers of members present in the premises of the exchange," Nadeem Naqvi, managing director of the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE), told Reuters.

"There is no presence of banking staff either so the trades done today will be settled tomorrow," he said.

"We will issue a notice in this regard soon."

The benchmark KSE 100-share index was up 0.50 percent by 0545 GMT on volume of just over 4 million shares.

Copyright Reuters, 2011