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Friday, January 25, 2008

Market falls again


Continuing the bearish mood, the market witnessed another round of selling, with index heavyweights, metal, power, and capital goods stocks shaving off around 1,000 points from the Sensex in intra-day trades. After opening on a positive note, the Sensex rallied sharply to touch the day's high of 18,185 on sustained buying in frontline stocks. However, as selling gained momentum the market slipped deep into the red to touch the day's low of 17,070. But, the rise in European markets helped the Sensex to erase partial losses towards the close as value buying emerged in index pivotal stocks. The Sensex finally closed the session with a loss of 372 points at 17,222. The broad-based Nifty too, slipped 170 points to close at 5,033.

The market breadth was negative, with the losers outnumbering the gainers in the ratio of 6.09:1. Of the 2,741 stocks traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), 2,341 stocks declined, 385 stocks advanced and 15 stocks ended unchanged. All the sectoral indices had a weak outing. The BSE Metal index slipped sharply and dropped 5.70% followed by the BSE Power index (down 5.32%), the BSE CG index (down 4.87%), the BSE Realty index (down 4.41%) and the BSE PSU index (down 4.10%).

Out of the 30 Sensex stocks, 24 stocks closed in negative territory. Among the major losers, NTPC slumped by 8.94% at Rs204, Reliance Energy plummeted by 8.75% at Rs1,816, L&T tumbled by 5.62% at Rs3,538, Hindalco shed 5.47% at Rs152, Bajaj Auto crashed by 4.76% at Rs2,110, ONGC dropped 4.70% at Rs944 and Wipro declined by around 4.55% at Rs412. However, HDFC surged 3.22% at Rs2,614, Satyam Computer moved up 1.77% at Rs400, Reliance Communications added 1.64% at Rs625 while, SBI, Bharti Airtel and ACC closed with marginal losses.

Over 2.95 crore shares of Ispat Industries changed hands on the BSE followed by RNRL (2.91 crore shares), Reliance Petroleum (1.80 crore shares), Tata Teleservices (1.22 crore shares) and IFCI (1.21 crore shares).

Valuewise, RNRL registered a turnover of Rs407 crore on the BSE followed by Reliance Industries (Rs313 crore), Reliance Petroleum (Rs304 crore), Reliance Energy (Rs175 crore) and Reliance Capital (Rs169 crore).