The Indian equity market ended near day’s low on Wednesday amid heavy sell off seen in scrips across the sector. Market participants preferred to remain cautious ahead of the monthly inflation data to be released on Thursday.
The NSE Nifty has declined by almost 130 points or 2.1% in the past three trading sessions. Today’s decline was led the Banking stocks, index heavyweights like SBI, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and PNB were among the major laggards.
Barring the FMCG sector all the other major BSE sectoral indices ended in the red.
Among the other major losers were Consumer Durables, PSU, Auto and the IT stocks. Even the Mid-Cap and the Small-Cap stocks were under pressure.
Finally, BSE Sensex closed at 19362, down 202 points over the previous close. It opened at day’s high of 19511 and hit an intra-day low of 19338.
The NSE Nifty closed at 5,851, down 63 points over the previous close. It earlier touched a day’s high of 5,893 and a day’s low of 5842. It opened at 5,884.
“With the IIP and the CPI data out of the way, market participants will look forward to the monthly inflation data which is scheduled to be released on Thursday. Technically, Nifty extended its weakness and closed below its 100-DMA (5,857), confirming a breakdown in the index after last week’s recovery. The undertone remains cautious and there is no point to taking any risky bets ahead of the RBI policy meet next week,” says Amar Ambani, Head of Research. IIFL
RIL, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Bajaj Auto, HDFC Bank, ONGC, Gail India, Tata Motors, ICICI Bank, HDFC, Hero MotoCorp, Maruti, Jindal Steel, Tata Steel were among losers in Sensex and Nifty.
ITC, Sun Pharma, Tata Power, Bharti Airtel, Coal India, Hindustan Unilever were among gainers in Sensex and Nifty.
The advance decline ratio was in favour of the bears. 1882 stocks declined against 1003 advancing stocks, while 128 stocks remained unchanged.
The INDIA VIX shot up by 7% to close at 16.20. It hit a day’s high of 16.43 and day’s low of 14.69.
Stocks which hit 52-week high during the week were Madras Cements, Satyam Comp, Asian Paints, Rollatainers and Vapi Paper.
Stocks which hit 52-week low during the week were Apple Finance, BEML, Golden Tob, JCT Electronics and JCT.
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Tata Motors ended lower by 1.2% after Jaguar Land Rover reported global retail sales growth of just 3% after growing 32% in January’13. JLR sold 26,855 units in February. Sales in China which grew 80% in January saw a decline of 22% in the month of February.
Shares of ONGC slipped by 2.7% on Wednesday. The company is looking at hiring Reliance Industries’ unused facilities on the east to quickly bring to utilized its discovered gas in the Krishna Godavari basin.
Shares of Raymond declined by 2.1%. The company said that it resumed operations at its Valsad plant in Gujarat following scrapping of closure notice by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB).
Most of the Asian markets lost ground on Wednesday with the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong among the top loser, the index was down 1.5%. Followed by the Shanghai Composite index, was down 1%. Even the Nikkei index in Japan and Straits Times in Singapore ended lower by 05% and 0.7% respectively.
Among the gainers were Kospi index up 0.32% and the Taiwan index added marginally by 0.01%.
The European stock markets opened lower following weakness in market across Asia. The FTSE index in UK was down 0.63%, the CAC index in France was down marginally by 0.37% and DAX index in Germany edged lower by 0.2%.