Market ends on a bearish note

Continuing its upward march the Sensex today opened with a positive gap of 36 points and moved on to touch the day's high of 14501. The Sensex, for most of the trading session, zigzagged between the negative and positive zones, making investors nervous. However, the market failed to sustain the early optimism and drifted into negative territory towards the close and the Sensex crashed to touch an intra-day low of 14325 on hectic selling in oil, FMCG and auto stocks. The Sensex finally ended the session with losses of 90 points at 14363 while the Nifty declined by 32 points to close at 4246.

The breadth of the market was weak. Of the 2,642 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,638 stocks declined, 928 stocks advanced and 76 stocks ended unchanged. The sectoral indices were largely weak. The BSE Oil & Gas index lost 1.36%, the BSE FMCG index declined by 1.29% and the BSE Auto shed 1.19%. However, the BSE Metal index rose 1.03%.

Several heavyweights took a sharp tumble on late selling pressure. Among auto stocks, Tata Motors slipped and shed 2.60% at Rs708 and Maruti Udyog tumbled by 1.78% at Rs815. Among the other major losers ITC slumped by 2.55% at Rs166, Reliance Communication lost 2.46% at Rs511, Ranbaxy slipped by 2.38% at Rs390, Gujarat Ambuja Cement dipped 1.50% at Rs115 and ONGC shed 1.45% at Rs913. SBI, ICICI Bank and Bharti Airtel were down over 1% each. Select counters, however, ended in the green. Tata Steel advanced by 5.01% each at Rs659, Reliance Energy gained 3.55% at Rs570 and HLL added 2.19% at Rs198.

Oil stocks declined on sharp selling pressure. Chennai Petro tumbled by 6.68% at Rs257, Petronet LNG dropped 3.03% at Rs51, Dolphin Offshore shed 2.90% at Rs223 and Gujarat Petronet lost 2.71% at Rs56.

Metal stocks, however, held ground and ended at higher levels. ISMT flared up by 5.49% at Rs85, Nava Bharat Ventures added 4.65% at Rs143, Ashapura Minechem advanced by 4.34% at Rs237, Ramsarup Industries moved up by 3.20% at Rs156 and Welspun Gujarat gained 2.68% at Rs163.

Over 2.38 crore Reliance Natural Resources shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Idea Cellular (76.83 lakh shares), Tata Teleservices (69.92 lakh shares), IFCI (64.19 lakh shares) and Reliance Petroleum (54.19 lakh shares).

Value-wise Reliance Capital registered a turnover of Rs205 crore on the BSE followed by Educomp Solutions (Rs195 crore), HDFC (Rs181 crore), Tata Steel (Rs168 crore) and Unitech (Rs125 crore).