Up, up and then down 10 points

With the bulls firmly in control for almost the entire trading session, stocks from across sectors posted smart gains and the market appeared to be heading towards a firm close. But that was before a strong bout of profit taking towards the close shaved off nearly 206 points from the day’s high. The Sensex witnessed strong optimism after resuming with a positive gap of 41 points at 13823. The US Fed’s decision to keep interest rates unchanged turned sentiments from cautious to bullish. While the action in several counters held the market firm above the 13900 levels in the first half of the trading session, the index notched up further gains in the afternoon to touch the day's high of 13977. However, the market slipped towards the close as the weakness in select heavyweight, oil, capital goods and public sector stocks dragged the index to an intra-day low of 13745. The Sensex finally ended the session with a loss of ten points at 13771, while the Nifty shed 12 points to close at 4067.

The broader market remained weak. Of the 2,634 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,328 stocks declined, 1,238 stocks advanced and 68 stocks ended unchanged. Among the sectoral indices the BSE Oil & Gas index dropped 1.03% at 7156, the BSE PSU index shed 0.98% at 6,355 and the BSE CG index was down 0.72% at 9874.

Among the major losers ONGC dropped 2.20% at Rs889, NTPC slumped 2.11% at Rs151, Ranbaxy shed 1.84% at Rs386, Tata Motors lost 1.24% at Rs714, L&T declined 1.16% at Rs1,691 and Maruti Udyog slipped by nearly 1.02% at Rs795. However, HDFC notched up gains of 5.26% at Rs1,680, Tata Steel rose 2.50% at Rs576, Bajaj Auto added 1.74% at Rs2,609, ITC advanced 1.71% at Rs163, HDFC Bank moved up by 1.60% at Rs1,012 and Hindalco gained 1.52% at Rs147.

Over 1.76 crore Reliance Natural Resources shares changed hands on the BSE followed by IFCI (1.20 crore shares), Nagarjuna Fertilizer (86.39 lakh shares), Orbit Corporation (59.07 lakh shares) and Fortis Healthcare (54.52 lakh shares).

Value-wise, Indiabulls Real Estate registered a turnover of Rs189 crore on the BSE followed by Page Industries (Rs134 crore), Tata Steel (Rs131 crore), Rolta India (Rs125 crore) and Orbit Corporation (Rs122 crore).