Market ends choppy

After surging for the last three sessions the market took a pause today. The market remained volatile throughout the day amid alternate bouts of buying and selling in front-line stocks. The Sensex began the trading session with a positive gap of 25 points at 14541. The index exhibited some strength in the afternoon and touched the day's high at 14565, but slipped on selling in consumer durables, metal, technology and oil stocks. After witnessing range-bound moves the market saw a strong bout of selling towards the close and the Sensex shed 112 points from the day's high. The Sensex finally ended the session at 14478, down 38 points, while the Nifty was down 19 points at 4196.

The broader market was positive. Of the 2,727 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,402 stocks advanced, 1,274 stocks declined and 51 stocks ended unchanged. A few sectoral indices ended in the green. The BSE CG index gained 0.38% at 9959 followed by the BSE IT index (up 0.35% at 5406) and the BSE Auto index (up 0.21% at 5725). However, the BSE CD index shed 2.09% at 3945 followed by the BSE Metal index (down 0.66% at 9284) and the BSE Teck index (down 0.56% at 3893).

Among the laggards Reliance Communications slipped 5.04% at Rs489, Hindalco declined 2.08% at Rs174, Hero Honda shed 1.52% at Rs719, Bharti Airtel dropped 1.38% at Rs771, HDFC Bank lost 1.20% at Rs1,088 and ITC fell 1.18% at Rs175. However, select heavyweights attracted some buying support. Reliance Energy gained 2.14% at Rs560, Ranbaxy rose 1.36% at Rs420, Cipla jumped 1.11% at Rs250 and ICICI Bank added 1.11% at Rs957.

Select consumer durables stocks witnessed considerable selling pressure. Videocon Industries dropped 2.55% at Rs443, Rajesh exports lost 2.48% at Rs468, Lloyd Electric declined 2.47% at Rs166, Blue Star slipped 2.29% at Rs234 and Titan Industries was down 1.70% at Rs1,007.

Over 70.67 lakh TCS shares changed hands on the BSE followed by IDBI (40.02 lakh shares), IDFC (34.64 lakh shares), Reliance Communications (29.27 lakh shares) and SAIL (21.39 lakh shares).

TCS topped the value list with a turnover of Rs908 crore on the BSE followed by Reliance Communication (Rs144 crore), Reliance Industries (Rs83 crore), Reliance Capital (Rs61 crore) and Zee Telefilms (Rs50 crore).