Pivotal Prices Take The Plunge On Bear Hammering

The bear-phase continued unabated on the Mumbai Stock Exchange yesterday with the sensitive index breaching the critical 3400 level and closing with a whopping loss of 81.02 points at 3358.47.

The market has surrendered the whole of last weeks losses in a single session and the bearishness is likely to continue as there were no buyers even at the current rate. The BSE-100 plunged by 34.03 points to 1464.06. The BSE-200 and Dollex finished lower at 325.54 and 150.97 compared to 332.49 and 154.24 at the last weekend.

The conditions were panicky with bears hammering the important shares like ACC, SBI, ITC, RIL, GACL, Tisco and Telco. Brokers were flooded with sell orders and the fresh speculative buying was virtually absent despite yesterday being the first day of the new settlement. Although there were no specific reasons for nervousness, it seems that speculators have changed their perceptions about Budget. They have turned pessimistic and feel that the Budget would not contain incentives for boosting the investments in capital market. Even the positive development of shifting 20 active scrips to forward group from yesterday has failed to arrest the downtrend.

 

The foreign investors took full opportunity of the situation and they picked up small parcels of fundamentally strong shares but their buying failed to have any impact on sentiment. The net investments of FIIs was Rs 27 crore on February 21. The total turnover on the screen-based Bolt trading system was Rs 524.03 crore, involving 2.70 crore shares. Out of 6671 scrips, a total of 2,241 scrips were traded on the Bolt systems.

Hectic trading was witnessed at SBI (Rs 169.69 cr), RIL (Rs 96.49 cr), ITC (Rs 92.20 cr), Tisco (Rs 33.56 cr), Gujarat Ambuja (Rs 17.45 cr), followed by ACC, Telco, Larsen & Toubro, BSES, MTNL, Bajaj Auto.