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Pivotals slip further, Sensex slides to 3230.60

Barring Hindustan Lever, pivotals's prices declined further on the Bombay Stock Exchange following speculative selling pressure by bull operators and lack of buying support from institutional investors.

Today's meeting of AIADMK MPs, one of the coalition partners in the BJP government at Madras, cast its shadow on the market, leading brokers said. They added that the major market players have preferred to stay away from the market for some time.

The marketmen also reacted nervously to UTI Chairman G P Gupta's appointment as the chairman and managing director of IDBI.

A leading BSE broker said that UTI has supported the market very well during Gupta's tenure.

The continuous gain by the rupee against US dollar seems to have attracted the FIIs who made small to moderate purchases in the afternoon in blue chips. Thus some of the pivotals witnessed recovery towards the fag end of the sessionir day's lower levels, a dealer said.

American funds reportedly made heavy buying in Hindustan Lever scrip on the BSE. The scrip opened at 1490, touched the day's high of 1619.50 and finally ended at 1595.50, netting a gain of Rs 86 against the previous close.

Mirroring the mixed trend, the BSE Sensex opened at 3210.60, touched the day's high of 3256.43 points, fell below the 3200 mark to touch the day's low of 3153.53 and finally ended at 3230.60 points, showing a net loss of 20.09 points against the previous close of 3250.69.

The broad-based BSE-100 index fell further by 11.04 points to 1416.19 points against the previous close of 1427.23 points. The BSE-200 and Dollex indices also declined by 3.61 and 0.88 points to 322.23 and 126.86 points as against the previous close of 325.84 and 127.74 points respectively.

Cement giant ACC declined marginally by Rs 3.50 to Rs 1216.50, Bajaj Auto drifted lower by Rs 7.50 to Rs 564.50, market leader ITC fell sharply by Rs 19.25 to Rs 632.75, L&T down by Rs 5.90 to Rs 223.40, Mahindra and Mahindra declined by Rs 4 to Rs 211.50, Reliance eased by Rs 2.10 to Rs 141.20, State Bank dropped by Rs 4.70 to Rs 206, Telco lost by Rs 3.30 to Rs 163.20 and Tisco moved down by Rs 2.50 to Rs 123.40.

Out of 7043 listed scrips, 1223 were traded in 87,973 trades during the day. Total turnover on the screen-based trading system was Rs 7.64 billion. Satyam Computer topped the list by registering highest turnover of Rs 1.78 billion, followed by market leader ITC Rs 1.26 billion, Hind Lever Rs 507 million, State Bank of India Rs 483 million and Pentafour Rs 437 million.

Other actively traded scrips were Reliance (Rs 428 million), Castrol Ind (Rs 377 million), HDFC (Rs 308 million), Zee Telefilms (Rs 285.3 million), Tata Tea (Rs 241.6 million), ACC(Rs 115.5 million), Infosys Tech (Rs 85 million), Telco (Rs 831 million), DIF (Rs 742 million) and MTNL (Rs 592 million).

UNI