With the bears getting the better of the bulls, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) commenced the new Samvat Year, on a dismal beginning.

As a result, the country’s premier bourse recorded its first-ever decline for a Diwali trading session this decade, as the benchmark 30-Share BSE Sensex sheeding as many as 151 points on the Dark Friday night during the muhurat trading.

With the market players resorting to a selling spree during the hour-long symbolic trading session to ring in the new year, the Sensex at one point nearly lost a whopping 300 points, before settling at 18,907.60 points down by 151.33 points.

This is the first negative close for Sensex in a muhurat trading, observed every Diwali evening, in the past seven years. The barometer index had last closed in the negative territory in a muhurat trading in 2000.
Selling pressure

Since the last Diwali, the bourses have added close to Rs 30 trillion to the investors’ wealth, measured in terms of the market capitalisation of all the listed companies.

However, there has been selling pressure on the bourses since the past few days, ever since the Sensex recorded its life-time high of 20,238.16 points on October 30 in the intra-day trade.

The Sensex extended its downslide for the fifth consecutive day today and currently stands at over 1,500 points below its peak registered on October 30.

Likewise, mimicing the BSE, National Stock Exchange’s the broader based S&P CNX Nifty index also ended 35.5 points (0.6 per cent) down at 5,663.25 points, as against its previous close of 5,698.75 points. However, Friday’s selling was mostly limited to the blue-chip stocks and both the Midcap and Small-cap indices of the BSE ended with gains.