Sensex drops 173pts; i-flex zooms 17%

The Sensex opened with a positive gap of 36 points at 14,008, and soon touched the day's high of 14,010. Subdued overseas markets cast its shadow soon, and the index slipped into negative zone in morning deals.

With players restoring to aggressive profit-taking, the index displayed negative trend for the rest of the day. Intense selling towards the close saw the index tumble to a low of 13,757 - down 253 points from the day's high.

The Sensex finally ended with a loss of 173 points at 13,799, and broke its eight-week winning streak (down 46 points) today.

The BSE Oil & Gas index dropped over 2% to 6095, and the Metal index shed 1.7% to 9041. The Auto and FMCG indices were down 1.5% each at 5393 and 9041, respectively.

The market breadth was negative - out of 2,655 stocks traded so far, 1,586 declined, 1,011 advanced and 58 were unchanged today.

INDEX MOVERS & SHAKERS

Tata Motors and HLL tumbled nearly 3% each to Rs 867 and Rs 234, respectively.

Reliance, ACC and ONGC shed 2.5% each to Rs 1,268, Rs 1,105 and Rs 841, respectively.

Satyam, Hindalco, Bajaj Auto and Reliance Communications slipped over 2% each to Rs 457, Rs 180, Rs 2,649 and Rs 447, respectively.

Tata Steel dropped nearly 2% to Rs 482. Hero Honda, HDFC Bank, TCS and Maruti were down around 1.5% each to Rs 738, Rs 1,085, Rs 1,176 and Rs 932, respectively.

Reliance Energy and Dr.Reddy's, however, bucked the trend and surged nearly 2.5% each to Rs 555 and Rs 775, respectively.

i-FLEX ZOOMS 17%

With Oracle revising its offer price for i-flex to Rs 2,100 per share, the shares of i-flex hit the roof today. The stock zoomed to a high of Rs 2,055, before closing with a solid gain of 17% (Rs 298) at Rs 2,049. The counter logged a volume of 6.85 lakh shares today as against the 2-week average daily volume of around 46,000 shares.

VALUE & VOLUME TOPPERS

Reliance Communications topped the value chart with a turnover of Rs 160.35 crore followed by HDFC (Rs 149.40 crore), Reliance (Rs 144 crore), i-flex (Rs 139.40 crore) and Parsvnath (Rs 110.50 crore).

Bellary Steel led the volume chart with trades of around 1.94 crore shares followed by Tele Data (78 lakh), Reliance Communications (35.30 lakh), Shiva Cement (26.50 lakh) and SpiceJet (25.70 lakh).