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Sensex loses 36 points

The Bombay Stock Exchange sensex fell below the 3,600 mark, but recovered partially to close at 3,683.31 points on Wednesday.

The market opened on a good note and improved further, but suddenly crashed under heavy speculative selling pressure. However, it recovered its intra-day losses at the fag end of the session on good buying support from foreign and domestic institutional investors.

While FIIs bought shares of Larsen and Toubro, ICICI and MTNL, the Unit Trust of India and other domestics made good purchases in Reliance and State Bank scrips.

Reflecting the trend, the sensitive index opened at 3,715.38, touched the day's high of 3745.71 points, fell below the 3,600 mark to touch the day's low of 3558.95. Later, it partially recovered to close at 3683.31, 36.31 points lower than the previous close of 3719.62.

Similarly, the broad-based BSE-100 index closed lower by 13.16 points at 1606.05. The previous close was at 1619.21 points.

The BSE-200 and dollex indices drifted lower by 2.32 and 0.74 points to 360.33 and 151.61 points as against the previous close of 362.65 and 152.35 points respectively.

Marketmen said the weak trend in the Asian market and the announcement of Bharatiya Janata Party in its manifesto that their party will put restrictions on FIIs for three years if they came to power were what majorly affected the trading sentiment.

"The fall of Indian rupee against the US dollar also added fuel to it," they said.

The total turnover reported on the BSE was Rs 8.95 billion. Tobacco giant ITC continued at the top with a turnover of Rs 2.59 billion, followed by SBI (Rs 1.25 billion), Tata Tea (Rs 1.16 billion), Reliance (Rs 720 million) and Castrol (Rs 393.8 million).

Hectic activity was observed at other counters like L&T (Rs 224.3 million), ICICI Ltd (Rs 220.8 million), Telco (Rs 135.3 million), BPL Ltd (Rs 120.6 million), BHEL (Rs 117.2 million), ACC (Rs 113.4 million), MTNL (Rs 94.1 million) and Bajaj Auto (Rs 86.4 million).

In the B1 group, active trading was in scrips like Corporation, Rel Pet, Kesoram, Ship Cor, Ingersoll, Raasi Cem, Infosys Tech, Munjal Showa, Aptech Ltd, Asahi Ind, Lml Ltd, Vashisti Det, Bank of India, Dsq Software and Satyam comp.

UNI