COMMENTARY
INTERVIEWS
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Equity prices reacted marginally and the Sensex drifted lower by seven points on hectic selling pressure by the foreign institutional investors at the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The FIIs have sold huge amount of tobacco giant ITC and other blue chip which reflected in the Sensex nominally after last two days' upward trend. Although the market opened with overnight buying spree and gradually went upto 3276.29 points.

Later in the afternoon session, bear operators started selling heavy weighted shares including some software share of 'B' group which crashed the Sensex below 3,100 mark.

The domestic institutions particularly Unit Trust of India and Life Insurance Corporation of India bought sizeable amount of index-based share that recovered the Sensex to close above 3200 mark, leading brokers said.

Reflecting the downtrend, the BSE Sensitive Index (30 scrips) opened at 3247.23 points, touched day's high of 3276.29 points, low of 3190.54 points and closed at 3212.10 points suffering a net loss of 7.83 points as against the previous close of 3219.93 points.

Another leading broker said that Morgan Stanley sold huge amount of blue chips mainly ITC, whereas local institutions continued with their buying spree which arrested heavy down fall in the share prices, they added.

The broadbased BSE National Index came down nominally by 01.06 points to 1417.36 points over the previous close of 1418.42 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices finished at 324.95 and 127.21 points as compared to yesterday's close of 325.43 and 127.39 points respectively.

The total turnover on the screen-based trading system was Rs 9.91 billion comprising 35.1 million shares in 109,556 trades.

ITC recorded highest turnover of Rs 2.87 billion followed by Satyam Computers Rs 1.56 billion, SBI Rs 697 million, Zee Telefilms Rs 669.1 million, RIL Rs 477.1 million, Pentafour Software Rs 472.9 million, BHEL Rs 399.8 million, Castrol Rs 198.8 million, MTNL Rs 191 million, Hindustan Lever Rs 159.7 million, Telco Rs 145.7 million, ACC Rs 132.7 million, Tata Tea Rs 131.8 million, L&T Rs 104.3 million in specified counters.

A good transaction was observed at Bata India (Rs 75.1 million), Wipro (Rs 42.6 million), Maars Software (Rs 21.9 million), Silverline (Rs 18.9 million), Software Solutions (Rs 16.3 million), HCL Infosys (Rs 9.5 million), CMC Limited (Rs 9.2 million), Bausch and Lomb (Rs 8.8 million), Kirloskar Oil Engineering (Rs 8.4 million), Cyber System (Rs 7.5 million) at 'B1' counter.

UNI