Market takes heavy pounding

The market witnessed another big fall today shedding over 1,000 points, as unabated selling in power, oil and realty stocks saw the Sensex to touch the day's low of 16,458. After resuming slightly lower at 17,427, the Sensex dropped immediately deep into the red tracking weak Asian peers. However, sustained buying in frontline stocks helped the index erase some of its losses by afternoon. But, the market mood turned extremely bearish in late trades and the Sensex tanked 834 points or 4.78% to close at 16,631. The Nifty shed 263 points or 5.14% at 4,857.

The market breadth was extremely weak. Of the 2,736 stocks traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), 2,456 stocks declined, 246 stocks advanced and 34 stocks ended unchanged. The sectoral indices were largely weak. The BSE Metal index lost 1.56%, the BSE Power index declined by 8.61%, the Oil & Gas index fell 7.07%, the BSE Realty index tumbled 6.29% and the BSE PSU index shed 6.05%. However, the BSE IT index closed with marginal gains.

Several heavyweights took a sharp tumble on late selling pressure. Reliance Energy tanked 19.40% at Rs1,582, Reliance Communications tumbled by 8.62% at Rs590, HLL dropped 7.46% at Rs196, M&M declined by 7.41% at Rs597, NTPC slumped by 6.74% at Rs190, Ranbaxy lost 6.70% at Rs357, SBI slipped by 6.67% at Rs2,045, L&T dipped 6.12% at Rs3,312 and Reliance Industries shed 6.07% at Rs2,275. Select counters, however, ended in the green. Satyam Computer surged 3.38% at Rs424 and Maruti Suzuki advanced by 1.01% at Rs812, while Infosys, TCS and Wipro moved up by 1% each.

Over 6.38 crore Reliance Power shares changed hands on the BSE followed by RNRL (2.68 crore shares), Ispat Industries (1.35 crore shares), Reliance Petroleum (1.24 crore shares) and Nagarjuna Fertilisers (93.79 lakh shares).

Valuewise, Reliance Power registered a turnover of Rs2,640 crore on the BSE followed by Reliance Energy (Rs398 crore), RNRL (Rs361 crore), Reliance Industries (Rs249 crore) and Reliance Petroleum (Rs191 crore).