MFs selling hits sentiment on BSE

MUMBAI, AUG. 7. A fresh bout of selling by domestic mutual funds adversely impacted the sentiment and the Sensex finished in the red in narrowly mixed activity on the Bombay Stock Exchange today.

The BSE benchmark 30-share index opened moderately down at 3322.81 and later fluctuated in an extremely narrow range between 3345.98 and 3317.44 before closing at 3319.67 against yesterday's close of 3329.95, a net loss of 10.28 points. The BSE-100 index fell by 10.88 points to 1570.17 from the previous close of 1581.05.

The selling that emerged during the latter part of the session was more pronounced in pivotals such as Hindustan Lever, ITC, L&T besides Zee Telefilms and several IT stocks, market sources said attributing the negative trend in the new economy stocks to the downslide on Wall Street for two successive sessions with the Nasdaq composite index dipping by about 32 points last night.

Local mutual funds, led by the Unit Trust of India, were sellers in several counters, particularly software stocks. Reliance and Telco were the day's star performers on fairly good buying support and contributed immensely to mitigate the damage to the Sensex.

Foreign institutional investors, which had stepped up activity last weekend, have once again turned cautious.

FIIs were consistent net buyers, albeit in small quantity, for the past several weeks.

In the specified group, 109 including 18 index-based counters registered sharp to moderate losses while 60 others closed with gains.

The BSE-200 index and the dollex were quoted moderately down at 344.35 and 121.70 compared with previous close of 346.81 and 122.54 respectively. The BSE-500 index eased by 7.04 points to 1009.80 from yesterday's close of 1016.84. The dollex-30 index was down at 578.53 against last close of 580.20.

The volume was extremely low and has fallen sharply to Rs. 737.54 crores from Rs. 850.21 crores yesterday. Balaji Telefilm clocked the highest turnover of Rs. 73.23 crores followed by HCL Tech, SSI, Reliance and Digital Equipment.

- PTI

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