Stocks turn weak

MUMBAI, JULY 6. Led by Reliance Industries and Zee Telefilms, stocks turned weak pushing the Sensex moderately down by about 12 points in an otherwise listless activity on the last day of current account on the Bombay Stock Exchange today due to slowdown in FII activity and lack of any worthwhile support.

The market ignored the Finance Minister, Mr. Yashwant Sinha's statement on the six-month ban on sale and repurchase of units under US-64 scheme, clearly indicating the Government's intentions to find a solution at the earliest.

Sentiment was affected by reports that the CBI had frozen Swiss accounts of Ketan Parekh, the main accused in the multicrore pay- order scam, as well as fresh profit warnings by technology majors on the U.S. markets that kept the Nasdaq composite index under pressure.

Retail investors and even foreign institutional investors, the principal driving force behind the market, have taken cautious stance with the financial results of key IT companies to be announced next week.

Infosys Technologies, which scored impressive gains on fairly good support prompted by expectations of a repeat of excellent performance for the first quarter of new fiscal, helped the Sensex substantially to mitigate its losses.

The BSE sensitive index opened weak at 3299.96 and later fluctuated in range of 3310.10 and 3286.74 before closing at 3305.78 against yesterday's close of 3317.63, netting a loss of 11.85 points. The BSE-100 index fell by 11.68 points to 1552.28 from 1563.96.

Twentyone index counters showed marked falls while nine others finished with gains.

The BSE-200 and the Dollex were quoted moderately down at 342.43 and 120.91 against 345.01 and 121.88 respectively. The BSE-500 eased by 7.88 points to 1008.44 from 1016.32.

The volume of business was low at Rs. 760.37 crores. Infosys clocked the highest turnover of Rs. 204.99 crores followed by Wipro (Rs. 70.53 crores), Satyam Computer (Rs. 55.24 crores), Balaji Telefilms (Rs. 50.78 crores) and Digital Equipment (Rs. 50.68 crores).

- PTI

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