Late selling wipes out early gains

MUMBAI, JULY 13. Late sell-off by domestic funds as well as local investors wiped out most of the early gains in equities and the Sensex managed to close in the positive territory on the Bombay Stock Exchange today.

Indian financial institutions reportedly pressed heavy sales forcing operators who had made fairly good commitments during the earlier part of the session to square up positions at the fag end.

It was the top heavyweighted counters Hindustan Lever and ITC that came to the Sensex's rescue by contributing positively.

HLL were exceptionally firm following consistent buying support reportedly from foreign funds which were selective buyers in IT stocks on the back of a strong price rally on the Wall Street yesterday.

Sparked by an upbeat revenue forecast from Microsoft, the Wall Street rally lifted the Dow Jones industrial average by a whopping 237.97 points and the Nasdaq composite index by 103.70 points.

The BSE sensitive index opened higher at 3470.94 and later gradually moved upwards to the day's high of 3513.79.

It, however, met with a strong resistance and dropped sharply to close at 3453.99 against yesterday's close of 3452.75, a net gain of 1.24 points.

The BSE-100 index finished marginally down by 4.75 points at 1614.05 against 1618.80.

Dealers also attributed the discouraging sentiment in Southeast Asian markets as one of the reasons for the sudden onslaught from investors.

Thirteen index-based shares including heavyweights such as HLL, ITC and SBI registered sharp to moderate gains while 17 others closed with losses.

The BSE-200 and the Dollex were quoted up at 356.63 and 125.90 against 355.76 and 125.54 respectively.

The BSE-500 edged up by 1.93 points to 1047.82 from 1045.89.

The volume of business improved further to Rs. 1,138.52 crores from Rs. 1,090.96 crores.

Infosys Technologies remained the top traded share with a turnover of Rs. 204.38 crores followed by Satyam Computer (Rs. 131.44 crores), Wipro (Rs. 91.70 crores), Digital Equipment (Rs. 90.87 crores) and Global Telesystems (Rs. 73.53 crores).

- PTI

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Section  : Business
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