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Sensex drops 20.34 points

The possibility of a conflict between Iraq and United States of America demoralised the sentiments of foreign institutional investors.

Being the last day of settlement, most of the bull operators were trying to square up their position which also aided the downtrend on the country's premier capital market, brokers added.

Reflecting the down trend, the BSE Sensitive index opened on overnight buying support and quoted higher at 3444.51 points. It moved up gradually to 3466.28 points till the midsession, but could not sustain the peak level, as bull operators started squaring up their positions. The Sensex drifted lower to 3409.62 points before closing at 3417.30 points, suffering a loss of 20.34 points as against the previous close of 3437.64 points.

FIIs sold sizeable amount of TELCO shares and local institutions including Unit Trust of India, General Insurance Corporation of India and Life Insurance Corporation of India has sold Hindustan Lever Limited and other heavy weighted shares.

The BSE-100 national index drifted lower at 1471.98 points over the last working day's close of 1479.63 points losing 07.65 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices finished at 326.58 and 139.88 points as compared to yesterday's close of 327.76 and 140.39 points decreasing 1.18 and 0.51 points respectively.

The total turnover was Rs 8.2 billion involving 32.4 million shares in 79,648 trades. Out of 6,926 scrips, a total number of 1,683 scrips were traded.

ITC registered highest volume of Rs 2.3 billion, followed by Tata Tea Rs 1 billion, Hind Lever Rs 859.8 million, Castrol Rs 723 million, Reliance Rs 582.6 million, SBI Rs 310.5 million, MTNL Rs 272.6 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 247.2 million, TELCO Rs 205.3 million, ACC Rs 136.3 million, L and T Rs 93.5 million, Sesa Goa Rs 74.6 million, TISCO Rs 64.8 million, Ponds India Rs 64.7 million and Nestle Rs 53.6 million in the specified counters.

Good transaction were observed at LML (Rs 55.1 million), Corporation Bank (Rs 27.2 million), Dig Equip (Rs 26.3 million), Pentafour (Rs 26 million), Indo Rama Syn (Rs 18.4 million), Hind Power (Rs 13.1 million) and HDFC Bank (Rs 7 million).

The BSE authorities have decided to shift the equity shares of 26 companies from non-specified securities (B1) group to specified securities (A) group from Monday.

With his addition the number of scrips in 'A' group will go up to 150 scrips.

UNI