Bears strike back

The Sensex showed solid strength in yesterday's trades and surged over 100 points on strong buying support. However, today the bears hit back strongly and triggered a major sell-off in the market during intra-day trades. US markets fell yesterday on the worse-than-forecast manufacturing report and higher stockpiles of oil, thereby reviving the concerns of recession. Tracking the same, major Asian indices fell over 1% and the Sensex resumed the session with a negative gap of 219 points at 17,516 and continued moving southwards. After plunging below the 17,300 mark to touch the day's low of 17,295, the market moved in a range with a negative bias. The market witnessed panic selling towards the close and the Sensex ended the session with losses of 386 points at 17,349, whereas the Nifty shed 81 points and closed at 5,111.

All the sectoral indices had a weak outing. The BSE Bankex index and the BSE IT index dropped over 3% each, while the BSE Teck index, the BSE Oil & Gas index, the BSE Auto index and the BSE Power index were down over 1-2% each. However, the BSE CD index and the BSE HC index ended in the green.

The market breadth was negative. Of the 2,795 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,766 stocks declined, 961 stocks advanced and 68 stocks ended unchanged. Most of the index heavyweights ended in the red. Bajaj Auto was the major loser and tumbled by 4.78% at Rs2,296. HDFC Bank slipped 4.40% at Rs1,475, Satyam Computer shed 4.23% at Rs439, ICICI Bank declined by 3.89% at Rs1,099, Infosys fell by 3.08% at Rs1,580 and SBI lost 2.96% at Rs2,115. Cipla, however, bucked the downtrend and gained 5.44% at Rs199 and Hindalco was up over 1% at Rs192 while, Maruti Suzuki closed with marginal losses.

Over 2.49 crore Centurion Bank of Punjab shares changed hands on the BSE followed by RNRL (1.65 crore shares), Reliance Power (1.25 crore shares), Ispat Industries (1.12 crore shares) and IFCI (87.43 lakh shares).

Valuewise, Reliance Power clocked a turnover of Rs524 crore on the BSE followed by RNRL (Rs219 crore), Reliance Capital (Rs200 crore), On Mobile (Rs165 crore) and Reliance Industries (Rs153 crore).