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Sensex still bearish, loses 41.25 points

The market opened on a bearish trend. In the intraday trading, share prices recovered marginally and pushed the Sensex up to cross the 4100 mark. At this level, bear operators as well as domestic institutions started booking profits, which drifted the Sensex lower, below the 4000 mark again. At the fag end, domestic institutions purchased equities at lower level which helped the Sensex climb.

Reflecting the trend, the BSE-30 Sensitive index opened at 4088.14 points, touched the day's high of 4104.98 points, low of 3954.31 points, before closing at 4050.98 points, suffering a loss of 41.25 points as against the previous close of 4092.23 points.

The broadbased BSE-100 National index also dropped below 1800 mark and finished at 1780.64 points over the last trading day's close of 1805.70 points, losing 25.06 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices came down by 06.11 and 02.65 points to 402.28 and 168.66 points as compared to yesterday's close of 408.39 and 171.31 points respectively.

Local institutions -- Unit Trust of India, Life Insurance Corporation, and General Insurance Corporation -- bought sizeable number of limelight shares like Tata Power, Tata steel, ITC, MTNL, and others, brokers added.

However, FIIs kept away from the Indian capital market for the third day today in a row, brokers said, and added that they appeared to be waiting for forthcoming Reserve Bank of India's credit policy. Moreover, the uncertain political situation at the Centre demoralised the sentiment of investors. However, software and pharmaceutical companies gained today after two day's of sliding, brokers added.

The total turnover on the screen-based trading was Rs 15.4 billion involving 82.6 million shares in 181,801 trades. Out of 6,998 scrips, a total number of 1,929 scrips were traded.

ITC registered the highest volume of Rs 2.1 billion, followed by RIL Rs 2.1 billion, Castrol India Rs 930.7 million, SBI Rs 804.6 million, Tata Tea Rs 743.8 million, Satyam Comp Rs 724.3 million, ACC Rs 440.5 million, Hind Lever Rs 354.2 million, Pentafour Software Rs 296.1 million, ICICI Rs 269.2 million, Tisco Rs 252.8 million, Tata Chem Rs 224.7 million, Glaxo India Rs 216.3 million, BHEL Rs 212 million and BPL Limited Rs 211.9 million in specified counters.

Good transactions were observed at Him Fut Comm (Rs 5.91 million), Oswal Agro (Rs 54.4 million), Cipla (Rs 41.5 million), BFL Softwr (Rs 29.2 million), Aptech (Rs 22.6 million), Hind Oil Exp (Rs 21.9 million), Reliance Pet (Rs 19.1 million), Software Sol (Rs 16.9 million), Wipro (Rs 14.1 million), Apollo Hosp (Rs 12.2 million), and Federal Bank (Rs 11.6 million) at 'B1' group.

UNI