The Hindu : Business : Sensex drops 55 points on late selling

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 13, 2004

Business

Business

Sensex drops 55 points on late selling

MUMBAI, APRIL 12. Equities, once again, turned weak and pulled the Sensex down by 55 points at close in an otherwise erratic movements on the Bombay Stock Exchange here today on late sell-off by domestic mutual funds as well as a large corporate house.

Heavyweighted counters such as Reliance Industries and Infosys Technologies bore the brunt of selling pressure.

Reflecting the slide, the BSE benchmark 30-share index that initially had risen to the intra-day high of 5867.07, fell during the last one hour of the session to end at 5783.79 against last Thursday's close of 5838.45, a net fall of 54.66 points.

Despite consistent net purchases by foreign institutional investors, who made net investments of Rs. 716 crores in the three sessions between April 5 and 7, brokers said the market failed to sustain because of profit taking by local mutual funds coupled with selective selling by corporates. A leading corporate house was believed to have pressed sales in key PSU counters., brokers added.

The FIIs' net inflows were Rs. 14,386 crores in the first three months of the year, including their investments in key public offers by the Government to divest its stake in some of the major companies.

The broad-based BSE-100 index moved down by 21.25 points to 3083.80. Besides RIL and Infosys, key counters such as Grasim, ITC, L&T, ONGC, SBI, Tisco, Tata Motors, HPCL, GACL, HDFC and HDFC Bank registered marked losses. In the specified group, 111 including 21 index-based scrips registered sharp to moderate losses while 84 others finished with gains. The BSE-200 and the Dollex-200 were quoted lower at 767.55 and 292.76 against 770.39 and 294.04 respectively. The BSE-500 eased by 5.44 points to 2351.22 and the Dollex-30 to 1087.86 from 1098.89.

The volume of business fell sharply to Rs. 2,020.95 crores from Rs. 2,547.69 crores last Thursday. ONGC remained the most active scrip with the highest turnover of Rs. 199.04 crores.

PTI

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