Equities drifted further downwards on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) yesterday following sustained selling pressure by bear operators and foreign institutional investors (FIIs).
Foreign funds continued their sales in blue chip scrips like ITC, Castrol, HLL, Colgate and Reliance Industries to generate funds ahead of the year end. However, financial institutions picked up small lots of shares of frontline scrips, mainly Tata Steel, RIL, SBI and others to provide some relief to the sentiment.
The BSE sensitive settled down at 3,347.33 as against Tuesday's close of 3,391.59, netting a fall of 44.26 points. The BSE-100 index also dipped by 17.07 points to 1,457.14 from previous close of 1,474.21.
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Market sources said FIIs were selling selective stocks to book profits in a bid to create some funds, before they could start purchases during the last settlement of the year, deliveries of which will have to be taken in the beginning of the new year. Generally, FIIs make aggressive purchases in the last week of the year.
The fresh offerings by FIIs provided an opportunity to bear operators to press heavy sales pushing the prices further down.
A leading player said, the Sensex pierced the 3,390-level and came close to another support level of 3,319, which is considered very important as the market might tumble after breaking this level, he added. The market found some resistance at this level, another dealer pointed out.
The BSE-200 and the Dollex were quoted down at 327.59 and 139.67 respectively. ITC remained the most active scrip with a turnover of Rs 367.20 crore of the total volume of business of Rs 810 crore. Other active scrips were SBI-new (Rs 100.35 crore), Tata Tea (Rs 91.37 crore), RIL (Rs 66.35 crore) and Castrol (Rs 32.65 crore).