Sensex sheds 110 points

A day after Sensex slipped over 333 points on an all round selling, the market opened on a positive note shrugging off worries about the 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 to vanish after adding 251 points to touch the day's high of 18,009. The market zigzagged between its positives and negatives thereafter, but eased in the afternoon on sustained selling in power, realty and Bankex stocks to touch the intra-day low of 17,418. Heavy buying in most of the index pivotal stocks helped Sensex trim most of its losses towards the close and end the session at 17,649, down 110 points. The Nifty closed with a loss of 30 points at 5,172.

However, the market breadth was in favour of losers as 1,773 stocks declined, 978 stocks advanced and 41 stocks remained unchanged on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Most of the sectoral indices closed with losses. BSE Realty index and BSE Power index were the major losers and slipped over 2% each. However, BSE Auto index soared 0.42% followed by BSE FMCG, Oil & Gas, Teck index and BSE IT index.

Among the 30 Sensex stocks, 13 ended in the green. Attracting strong buying support, Hind Utilities surged by 5.04% to Rs206.50, Bajaj Auto shot up by 3.83% at Rs2,356, HDFC Bank jumped by 2.35% at Rs1,568, ONGC advanced by 2.05% at Rs988.40, Tata Motors scaled up by 1.44% at Rs706, Bharti Airtel zoomed 1.43% at Rs864 and TCS added 1.11% at Rs875.25. Among the laggards, Hindalco tumbled 5.88% at Rs165.75, DLF slipped 5.76% at Rs812.55, ICICI Bank fell 3.31% at Rs1,145, M&M was down 3.14% at Rs669, SBI lost 2.63% at Rs2,162 and ITC moved down 2.16% at Rs195.20.

Over 2.11 crore RNRL shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Ispat Industries (1.46 crore shares), RPL (1.37 crore shares), Essar Oil (0.92 crore shares) and IFCI (0.88 crore shares).