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Sensex touches 20-month low, but recovers

Speculatives on the Bombay Stock Exchange recovered smartly from an initial loss of over 200 points and improved by 10 points over Monday's close, to 3,161.08.

The market opened with the BSE-30 index crashing below the two psychological barriers of 3,100 and 3,000 marks, to touch a 20-month low of 2,965 points (November 22 1996) during the intra-day trading session following continuous crisis in the Asian capital market. A further slide in the Indian rupee against the US dollar in forex completely demoralised the sentiment of foreign institutional investors.

In the third session of trading, domestic institutions like the Unit Trust of India and bull operators purchased considerable amount of index-based shares, improving the sensex.

Leading brokers said the payment difficulties, particularly at the BPL and Videocon counters, continued to create confusion among bear operators. A clear picture of the payment problems can be known only on Thursday evening as pay-in takes place that day, they said.

Mirroring the uptrend, the BSE sensitive index opened lower at 3,114.59 points, touched the day's high of 3,171.57 points and low of 2,961.81 points before closing at 3,161.08 showing a net gain of 08.12 points as compared to Monday's close of 3,152.96 points.

The other three indices including the broadbased BSE national index, meanwhile, came down marginally on moderate selling spree from bull operators. It closed at 1,381.55 points over the last trading day's close of 1,385.27 points, suffering a nominal loss of 03.72 points.

The BSE-200 and dollex indices declined by 01.50 and 0.89 points to 314.51 and 123.58 points as compared to the previous close of 316.01 and 124.47 points respectively.

Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hedge, meanwhile, has said that the Reserve Bank of India would take steps to stabilise the Indian rupee at the present level.

UNI