Sensex, Nifty Snap Two-Day Winning Streak Dragged By Banks

The Indian equity benchmarks snapped their two-day winning streak dragged by selling pressure in banking and financial services shares. The benchmarks traded on a positive note for most part of the day on the back of strength in index heavyweights Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Reliance industries and Maruti Suzuki. However, late selling pressure in banking shares ICICI Bank, HDFC, HDFC Bank and Bajaj Finance wiped out entire intraday gains. The Sensex fell as much as 426 points from the day’s highest level and Nifty 50 index dropped below its important psychological level of 15,750.

The Sensex ended 67 points or 0.13 per cent lower at 52,483 and Nifty 50 index declined 27 points to settle at 15,721.

For the month of June, Sensex has advanced 1.05 per cent and Nifty 50 index gained 0.89 per cent.

In today’s session, selling pressure was broad-based as all the 11 sector gauges, barring the index of information technology shares, ended lower led by the Nifty Bank index’s 0.8 per cent fall. Nifty Financial Services, FMCG, Media, Metal, PSU Bank, Private bank and Realty indices declined between 0.3-0.8 per cent.

Mid- and small-cap shares outperformed their larger peers as Nifty Midcap 100 and Nifty Smallcap 100 indexes rose 0.2 per cent.

Among the individual shares, Uflex Limited rose as much as 19.4 per cent to hit record high of Rs 570.05 on the BSE a day after its net profit in January-March period rose 162 per cent or 2.65 times to Rs 265 crore compared with Rs 101 crore in the same period last year.

Shree Cements was top Nifty loser, the stock fell nearly 2 per cent to close at Rs 27,600. Bajaj Finserv, Power Grid, UPL, ICICI Bank, ONGC, NTPC, Eicher Motors, HDFC, Adani Ports, Cipla and UltraTech Cement also declined between 1-1.8 per cent.

On the flipside, Coal India, Reliance Industries, Divis Labs, infosys, Tech Mahindra, SBI Life and Maruti Suzuki were among the gainers.

The overall market breadth was marginally positive as 1,708 shares ended higher while 1,528 closed lower on the BSE.