Market rebounded sharply from their day lows to end flat, amid positive European cues, after gains in index heavyweights helped offset most of the losses in metal and rate sensitive shares.
The 30-share Sensex provisionally ended down 18 points at 17,206 and the 50-share Nifty provisionally ended down 12 points at 5,216.
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(Updated at 14:38 hrs)
Markets recovered from their day lows in late noon trade on Friday, amid positive cues from Europe, with rate sensitive and select metal shares paring some of their early losses.
However, the weak rupee and worries over drought like situation continued to weigh on market sentiment.
At 2:30PM, the 30-share Sensex was down 73 points at 17,151 after touching an intra-day low of 17,027 and the 50-share Nifty was down 26 points at 5,202.
Asian shares eased on Friday as the European Central Bank, after inaction from the Federal Reserve, disappointed markets looking for an imminent move to deal with the euro zone debt crisis, spurring risk aversion. The Nikkei ended down 1%. Among others, except for the Shanghai Composite and Straits Time all other indices were trading lower.
European shares and the euro staged a slight recovery on Friday from a big selloff provoked by the European Central Bank's failure to satisfy investors' hopes of swift action to tackle the debt crisis. The CAC-40, DAX and FTSE-100 were all up over 1 per cent each.
Among the sectoral indices, Metal, Capital Goods and rate sensitive sectors were among the top losers down 1-2% each.
Metal shares were trading lower after the metal gauge on the London Metal Exchange, LMEX ended 1.3% lower on Thursday. Tata Steel, Jindal Steel and and Sterlite which were down 2 per cent each.
Capital goods majors L&T and BHEL also recovered from their day lows and were down 1.8% and 1.2%, respectively.
Bank shares were down on concerns that lower lending rates would hurt margins going forward. SBI has recently announced cut in home and auto loan rates. SBI was down 0.5% and ICICI Bank slipped 2% each.
The market breadth continued to remain weak but has improved slightly with 1,129 gainers and 1,508 losers on the BSE.Markets recover from day lows