It's blood bath on bourses

Selling was seen across all sectors, with shares from interest rate sensitive sectors-banking, realty and auto pack dominating the slide, while the day’s sell-off was wide-based with stocks across sectors being hammered brutally. Index heavyweight Reliance Industries slipped in highly volatile trade.

Sentiment remained edgy with latest quarterly earnings from select pivotals falling short of street estimates and following the recent selling drive by the foreign institutional investors. The BSE Sensex closed at 16,290, down 491 points and the NSE Nifty closed at 4,853 after losing 155 points.

Weak global cues especially with low US Index futures also weighed on the negative sentiments in Dalal Street, with the Sensex having declined more than China’s Shanghai Index, which remained flat.  Some analysts feel that Sensex can even touch 12,000- 12,500 level in the first half of 2010. 

As per provisional figures on NSE, the foreign funds sold shares worth Rs 1,002.60 crore and domestic funds bought shares worth Rs 716.22 crore on Monday. After the Monday’s fall the BSE Sensex has dropped from the recent high of 17,641 on 18 January 2010, by 1351 points or 7.65 per cent.

The market breadth was very weak as 2580 shares on BSE declined as compared with 335 that rose. A total of 26 shares remained unchanged.  Yet, the markets on Wednesday reported its highest ever turnover of Rs 1,82,984 crore including biggest ever NSE F&O turnover of Rs 1,58,503 crore, while the NSE cash turnover for the day was at Rs 18,716 crore and BSE cash at Rs 5,764 crore.

The BSE Mid-Cap index fell 3.98 per cent and the BSE Small-Cap index fell 5.06 per cent, thereby both the indices have had underperformed the Sensex.  Going by the performance of overseas bourses during the day, Asian stocks - which fell for the eighth straight day on Wednesday - suffered steep losses ranging from 2 to 3.5 per cent. Key benchmark indices in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and China were down by between 0.51 and 1.24 per cent.