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Sensex sheds 37.61 points

Castrol India and TISCO led the downtrend in the capital market . rumours about bonus shares from Castrol India turned out untrue after the clarification of the management about the issue. The management said there would not be any issue during the current financial year which demoralised the sentiment of investors who started profit-booking at higher levels.

Little activity was witnessed in both selling and buying by the foreign institutional investors, said brokers, adding that this trend would likely to continue till the forming of new government at the Centre. Only then would there be movement in the capital market.

The Calcutta-based bull operators have sold heavily at the bluechip countess which was the main reasons for the downfall in the share prices, they added.

The market opened under selling pressure from domestic institutions. Later, bear operators entered the market and bought considerable amount of heavy-weighted shares which recovered the pivotal prices. In the afternoon session, the Calcutta-based operators sold heavily which crashed the Sensex and remained at same level till the fag-end, brokers added.

Reflecting the downtrend, the BSE Sensitive index opened at 3452.36, touched the day's high of 3462.36 points, low of 3418.20 points, before closing at 3418.34 points suffering loss of 37.61 points as against the previous close of 3455.95 points.

The BSE-100 index dropped below the psychological barrier of 1500 mark and finished at 1489.79 points losing 15.37 points over the last trading day's close of 1505.16 points. The BSE-200 and Dollex indices settled down at 333.91 and 142.69 points compared to yesterday's close of 336.90 and 144.79 points, decreasing by 02.99 and 02.10 points respectively.

The volume of the business was very thin as total turnover declined to Rs 8.4 billion as compared to Rs 10.7 billion the previous day. Out of 6886 scrips, a total number of 1570 scrips were traded.

Castrol India registered highest volume of Rs 2.1 billion followed by ITC Rs 1.7 billion, SBI Rs 1.3 billion, Tata Tea Rs 746.6 million, Reliance Rs 376.7 million, TELCO Rs 235.6 million, TISCO Rs 191.9 million, MTNL Rs 168.9 million, Hind Lever Rs 151.5 million, BHEL Rs 130.1 million, ICICI Rs 96.5 million, ACC Rs 83.5 million, L and T Rs 65.7 million, BPL Limited Rs 64.6 million and Bajaj Auto Rs 53.4 million in the specified counters.

Good transactions were observed at Corporation Rs 178.6 million, ICICI Bank Rs 53.1 million, HDFC Bank Rs 28.2 million, LML Rs 27.2 million, Contain Corp Rs 21 million, NIIT Rs 1.85 million, Bank of Baroda Rs 18.4 million, Indian Oil Rs 17.2 million and Hoechst Marion Roussell Rs 13.5 million at the B1 counters.

UNI