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Despite contagion effect, Sensex falls slightly

Heavy selling by foreign institutional investors drifted the Sensex lower at the Bombay Stock Exchange today.

According to leading brokers, FIIs offloaded a large quantity of key pivotals like State Bank of India, Reliance, ITC, TISCO, and TELCO to fulfill redemption pressure exerted from East Asia.

Major domestic institutions like Unit Trust of India, Life Insurance Corporation and General Insurance Corporation bought good quantity of shares in the market. Marketmen said that buying by these institutions neutralised the impact of FII selling, which would have pushed the Sensex even further below today's close.

The BSE Sensitive index opened at 3460.77 points. It saw a high of 3482.05 points and a low of 3380.98 points. The Sensex finally closed at 3400.79 points as against the previous close of 3431.72 points, showing a net loss of 30.93 points.

The BSE-100 index ended at 1482.80 points as against the previous close of 1493.03 points, showing a decline of 10.23 points.

The BSE-200 index closed at 333.60 points as compared to 335.32 points yesterday, showing a loss of 1.72 points. The Dollex index closed at 138.23 points as compared to 139.95 points yesterday, showing a decline of 1.72 points.

The total turnover on the bolt network was Rs 9.45 billion. The volume of shares traded was 37 million.

ITC topped the turnover list with Rs 3.1 billion followed by Tata Tea (Rs 1.2 billion), SBI (Rs 1.1 billion), Reliance (Rs 788.9 million), Castrol (Rs 501.1 million) and TELCO (Rs 411.5 million).

Good transactions were recorded at MTNL (Rs 274.3 million), HLL (Rs 264.5 million), TISCO (Rs 173.8 million), L&T (Rs 126 million), ACC (Rs 120.6 million), BHEL (Rs 99.6 million), Bajaj Auto (Rs 89.7 million), IPCL (Rs 84.8 million) and ICICI (Rs 67 million).

Hectic activity was seen in Corp Bank (Rs 51.1 million), Nicholas Piramal (Rs 34.4 million), VSNL (Rs 23.5 million), NIIT (Rs 19.2 million) and Infosys (Rs 15.8 million).

UNI