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Sensex crosses 3,500 mark

After opening on a dull note, speculatives recovered modestly and pushed the Bombay Stock Exchange sensex over the 3,500 mark following heavy short-covering by bear operators and good buying support from foreign institutional investors.

The complete recovery of the overseas market from last month's meltdown improved investor sentiments, especially that of FIIs, leading brokers said.

The market opened with buying support from bear operators. Later, FIIs and domestic institutions joined them, pushing the sensex up.

The BSE sensitive index (30 scrips), though it opened slightly lower at 3,450.75 points due to heavy short covering, attracted buying support from financial institutions. It went up to 3,541.23 points during the intra-day trading before closing at 3,523.44 points, showing a net gain of 56.58 points as against its previous close of 3,466.86 points.

The broadbased BSE national index (100 scrips) closed at 1,525.22 points over last day's 1,503.07 points, gaining 22.15 points.

The BSE-200 and dollex indices improved by 05.10 and 01.98 points to 344.69 and 153.15 points as compared to Thursday's close of 339.59 and 151.17 points respectively.

The total turnover on screen-based trading declined to Rs 9.79 billion from the previous day's Rs 10.47 billion.

ITC topped the turnover list with Rs 4.96 billion. Next came Tata Tea (Rs 919.1 million), SBI (Rs 698.3 million), Castrol Ind (Rs 444.1 million), Reliance (Rs 442.7 million), Tisco (Rs 342.3 million), Telco (Rs 201.3 million), ACC (Rs 141.2 million), Hind Lever (Rs 128.1 million), MTNL (Rs 126.4 million), Bharat Petro (Rs 103.1 million), Bajaj Auto (Rs 66 million), BHEL (Rs 65.9 million), Hindalco (Rs 65.8 million) and Hero Honda (Rs 53.9 million).

Among the non-specified counters, good transactions were witnessed at Nicholas Pir (Rs 78.8 million), Satyam Comp (Rs 47.9 million), Videsh Sanch (Rs 31.2 million), Infosys Tech (Rs 26.4 million), NIIT (Rs 16.8 million), Software Sol (Rs 15.8 million) and Carr Aircon (Rs 13.3 million).

UNI