Market slips on profit taking

After registering gains of 325 points in the last two sessions, the market slipped on profit taking in early trades and the Sensex lingered in negative territory throughout the trading session. Even as the major Asian indices recovered from yesterday's slump, the Sensex faltered after touching a new intra-day high of 13076 in early trades. Further, the RBI in its credit policy hiked the repo rate by 0.25%, which further hurt the market sentiment and increased the selling pressure in the afternoon. The weakness in heavyweight, tech, banking and consumer durables stocks dragged the index to the day's low of 12908, 116 points below its last close. The Sensex finally closed with losses of 62 points at 12962. The Nifty dropped 25 points and closed at 3744.

Dragging down the market, Reliance Communications shed 3.71% at Rs379, Bharti Airtel tumbled 2.18% at Rs530, Wipro slipped 3.11% at Rs538, Tata Motors slumped 2.83% at Rs828, HDFC Bank shed 2% at Rs1,004, Gujarat Ambuja Cements lost 2.05% at Rs117 and Tata Steel declined 1.59% at Rs490. However, select blue chip counters managed to clock decent gains. HLL rose 2.12% at Rs234 on impressive third quarterly numbers. Satyam gained 2.37% at Rs441, HDFC jumped 1.31% at Rs1,470, ITC added 1.25% at Rs190, ONGC advanced 1.37% at Rs816 and Hero Honda was up 1.39% at Rs756.

Except the BSE FMCG index, the rest of the sectoral indices ended in the red. The BSE Teck index dropped 1.29% at 3271 while the other indices were down around 1% each. However, the BSE FMCG index advanced 1.49% at 2049 on the back of good earnings numbers from HLL, Tata Tea and Dabur India. The breadth of the market was weak.

FMCG stocks bucked the downtrend and rallied sharply on sustained buying support. Colgate soared 7.55% at Rs415, McDowell shot up by 5.97% at Rs753, United Breweries gained 5.44% at Rs179, GTC Industries advanced 4.84% at Rs195, Jagatjit Industries added 4.54% at Rs70 and Kothari Products was up 2.76% at Rs510.

Over 1.55 crore Reliance Natural Resources shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Silverline Technologies (72.32 lakh shares), Nandan Exim (66.36 lakh shares), Mysore Cements (54.02 lakh shares) and Morepen Laboratories (48.70 lakh shares).

Value-wise Jaiprakash Associates registered a turnover of Rs242 crore on the BSE followed by Hindustan Zinc (Rs208 crore), Tech Mahindra (Rs164 crore), Tata Motors (Rs98 crore) and Reliance Industries (Rs89 crore).