PSU oil stocks rally in volatile market

Sustained selling pressure persisted for the third consecutive session and the Sensex fell over 111 points at close. Despite opening on a positive note, the Sensex could not hold on to its gains on profit bookings in most of the heavyweights and information technology stocks. The market took cue from the firm Asian markets and rallied sharply to touch the day's high of 19,679, up 278 points by afternoon. Thereafter, displaying some volatile moves the market slipped towards the close on unabated selling to touch its day's low of 19,249. The Sensex finally wrapped up the session by losing 111 points at 19,290, while the Nifty ended the session at 5,782, down five points.

The market breadth was negative, with the losers outpacing the gainers in the ratio of 1.6:1. Of the 2,779 stocks traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), 1,670 stocks declined, 1,030 stocks advanced and 79 stocks ended unchanged. Among the sectoral indices, the BSE IT index tumbled by 4.34% followed by the BSE Teck index (down 3.20%), the BSE Bankex index (down 1.54%), the BSE Realty index (down 1.01%) while, the BSE Oil & Gas index flared up by 2.63% and the BSE PSU index gained 1.08%.

Except a few, the index stocks ended at lower levels. Infosys lost heavily and tumbled 5.78% at Rs1,744. Among the other losers, HDFC Bank slumped 5.16% at Rs1,618, Satyam Computer slipped 4.03% at Rs435, ICICI Bank fell 2.98% at Rs1,204, Reliance Communication dipped by 2.50% at Rs727, Wipro was down 2.05% at Rs477and Bharti Airtel lost 1.98% at Rs900. However, select PSU oil stocks bucked the trend and rallied sharply. Reliance surged 4.04% at Rs2,763, BHEL vaulted 3.55% at Rs2,821, SBI spurted 2.66% at Rs2,267 and M&M scaled up 2.54% at Rs760.

Over 5.56 crore Reliance Natural Resources Ltd shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Reliance Petroleum (3.60 crore shares), Ispat Industries (3.37 crore shares), IFCI (82.97 lakh shares) and Factor Alloys (81.85 lakh shares).

Valuewise, Reliance Industries registered a turnover of Rs222 crore on the BSE followed by L&T (Rs191 crore), Reliance Energy (Rs182 crore), SBI (Rs139 crore) and Infosys (Rs118 crore).