Sensex sheds 74 points

A day after Sensex slipped over 270 points on all-round selling, the market opened on a positive note shrugging off worries about subprime crises. However, the market was gloomy amid a range-bound trend during intra-day trades influenced by subdued international markets. The Sensex saw strong optimism vanish after adding 68 points to touch the day's high of 20,172. The market zigzagged between its positives and negatives thereafter, but eased in the afternoon on sustained selling in capital goods, banking and tech stocks to touch the intra-day low of 19,936. Heavy buying in the index pivotal stocks helped Sensex trim most of its losses towards the close and end the session at 20,031, down 74 points. The Nifty closed with a loss of 10 points at 6,048.

However, the market breadth was heavily tilted in favor of gainers as 2,077 stocks advanced, 837 stocks declined and 26 stocks remained unchanged on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Most of sectoral indices closed with marginal losses. BSE Tech index and BSE Bankex index were the major losers and slipped over 1% each. However, BSE HC index soared 2.52% followed by BSE CD index (up 2.51%) and BSE FMCG index (up 1.44%).

Among the 30 Sensex stocks 15 ended in the green. Attracting strong buying support ACC surged by 3.58% at Rs1,103, Ranbaxy shot up by 2.69% at Rs422, Cipla jumped by 2.65% at Rs209, HLL advanced by 2.33% at Rs217, Reliance Industries scaled up by 1.99% at Rs2,889, ITC zoomed 1.88% at Rs201 and Hindalco added 1.84% at Rs213. Among the laggards, Bharti Airtel tumbled 3.57% at Rs953, ICICI Bank slipped 2.87% at Rs1,207, HDFC fell 2.51% at Rs3,059, Satyam Computer was down 2.36% at Rs411 and Tata Motors lost 2.03% at Rs744.

Over 3.21 crore Kaushal Infra shares changed hands on BSE followed by Ispat Industries (2.11 crore shares), IFCI (1.81 crore shares), GV Films (1.80 crore shares) and Kashyap Technologies (1.64 crore shares).

Sun TV was the most actively traded counter on the BSE and registered a turnover of Rs482 crore followed by Kaushal Infra(Rs252 crore), Kolte Patil Developers (Rs246 crore), JP Hydro (Rs207 crore) and IFCI (Rs207 crore).