By IANS
Mumbai : A key Indian stock market index logged its steepest intra-day fall Monday and lost over 2,000 points, as bears tightened their grip on the bourses amid worries over US recession, before staging a 700-point rally towards the closing bell.
As trading came to a close, the 30-share sensitive index (Sensex) of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) had made a marginal recovery, but was still down 1,408.35 points, or 7.41 percent, in what was the steepest closing fall since May 2004.
In terms of market capitalisation, investors lost nearly $170 billion in a single day and close to $300 billion in the past six trading sessions when the current downtrend began.
The biggest intra-day decline earlier was on Oct 17 when the index shed 1,743 points due to the markets watchdog’s purported move to impose restrictions on the unregistered funds that were operating through participatory notes.
At one point, an hour before the closing bell, the key index had shed 2,062.20 points, or over 11 percent, before staging a recovery of nearly 700 points, as investors made a feeble attempt to buy stocks at lower levels.
The index finally closed at 17,605.35 points against 19,013.70 points Friday – a significant drop from the all-time high of 21,206.77 points that was scaled Jan 10 this year.
The broader 50-share S&P CNX Nifty index of the National Stock Exchange also suffered a loss of 496.50 points, its biggest, at 5,208.80 points.
The market breadth was distinctly negative, with all 30 shares in the basket of Sensex shares ending in the red, while in the ‘A’ group, only three managing to stay afloat against 214 that declined.
Data available with the Mumbai bourse showed the Sensex has lost 3,122.70 points, or 15.07 percent, over the past week.
“Clearly, fears of a recession in the US dealt a major blow to sentiments. Heavy selling by foreign funds, with no support from domestic institutions, also led to the gloom,” said an analyst with a leading brokerage here.
“Since there a large amount of money is also locked on account of subscriptions to the mega public offering by Reliance Power, little cushion was available to soften the bear onslaught,” the analyst added.
The index for metal firms was the worst hit, losing over 13 percent, followed by those for realty, down 12.83 percent, oil and gas, down 11.95 percent, power, down 10.94 percent and public sector units, down 10.67 percent.
Among the Sensex shares, Reliance Energy led the losers, with a fall of 16.38 percent, followed by ACC, down 15.85 percent, Bajaj Auto, down 15.21 percent, NTPC, down 14.15 percent and Reliance Communications, down 12.71 percent.
Hindustan Aluminium, DLF, Grasim, Reliance Industries, Tata Motors also logged steep losses of between 8.25 percent and 10.5 percent.