Sensex slips further

he market took a sharp dip in early trades and continued moving down, as shares across sectors witnessed substantial selling pressure on the RBI’s announcement about the increase in the cash reserve ratio. The Sensex began the trading session with a negative gap of 100 points at 13990 and exhibited weakness through the day. The selling pressure in front-line stocks kept the banking and auto stocks in the red that dragged down the index to an intra-day low of 13805. The Sensex pared some losses on selective buying in metal stocks and ended the session with losses of 81 points at 14010. The Nifty was up three points and closed at 4047.

The breadth of the market was negative. Of the 2,564 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,491 stocks declined, 1,012 stocks advanced and 61 stocks ended unchanged. Among the sectoral indices the BSE Bankex shed 3.99% at 6977 followed by the BSE Auto index (down 1.09% at 5479) and the BSE PSU index (down 0.37% at 6119). On the other hand the BSE Metal index was up 1.56% at 8618.

Among the Sensex stocks, SBI tumbled 6.09% at Rs1,101, HDFC Bank plunged 5.15% at Rs1,017, ICICI Bank slumped 4.09% at Rs915, Maruti Udyog dropped 3.77% at Rs857, Grasim shed 3.45% at Rs2,656, HDFC lost 2.30% at Rs1,683, Tata Motors was down 1.71% at Rs850 and Infosys declined 1.05% at Rs2,284. The other front-line stocks were down around 1% each. However, Hindalco was marginally up at Rs146, Bharti Airtel gained 2.88% at Rs761, Reliance Communication advanced 2.32% at Rs451 and Wipro was up at Rs650.

Over 3.26 crore IFCI shares changed hands on the BSE followed by IDBI (1.09 crore shares), IDBI (56.68 lakh shares), HFCL (50.05 lakh shares) and RNRL (44.35 lakh shares).

Infosys was the most actively traded counter with a turnover of Rs105 crore on the BSE followed by Tata Steel (Rs102 crore), Reliance Communications (Rs95 crore), SBI (Rs91 crore) and HDFC Bank (Rs76 crore).