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Sensex touches under 14K mark, looses 388 points

February 23rd, 2007

Friday being the last trading day on one side and the usual worries such as being the pre-budget week closure, inflation worry and a caution that the index heavy weight stocks are already overvalued has led heavy selling of scripts in the stock markets today. NSE Nifty and BSE Sensex suffered one of their biggest losses in recent times today as declining stocks outnumbering advancing stocks by a huge ratio.

Sensex closed the day at 13633 (-388 points;-2.7%) while the NSE Nifty closed at 3939 (-101 points;-2.5%). Both NSE and BSE closed lower by 5% this week compared to the previous.

No sector was spared today and almost all big and well known stocks ended in red except few names such as Tata Steel (on BSE 30) and GAIL, Suzlon Energy and Reliance (on NSE 50) which ended marginally high. IT stocks ended low. Big Indian technology companies such as Rolta (that saw good trading yesterday), Wipro, Satyam, Infosys, Polaris, Mphasis closed in red.

Banking stocks seems to be have suffered the most during the week following Inflation worries and Reserve Bank of India’s decision of CRR hike. The situation seems to be not just limited to the India Banking sector but is visible in other markets too. Bank of Japan hiked rates by 25 bps earlier this week. India’s largest private sector bank ICICI Bank has hiked its deposit rates and lending rates by 50 bps. Banking stocks OBC, Bank of India, UTI Bank, ICICI Bank closed in red while Syndicate Bank and Corporation Bank manged to stay in green.

Amongst the BSE Small Cap and BSE Midcap indices, the Small Cap index took a heavy blow as it came down by 3.75% as against Midcaps were down by 2.4%.

Auto and auto ancillary sector stocks such as Cummins, Sundaram-Clayton, Escorts, Ashok Leyland and TVS Motor too ended in red.

Power Finance Corporation Limited (PFC) that got listed today opened at 113.00    and saw an intra-day high of 119.40 and an intra-day low of 105.55 before closing a bit on the lower side at 111.65. On the whole, the script managed to trade 92113982     shares.

Entry Filed under: Equity Markets, Closing Bell