Mumbai, India (BBN ) – Falling for the fourth straight session, the benchmark BSE Sensex continued to trade in the red today on sustained selling by investors and funds amid weak Asian cues.
The Nifty opened 13 points down at 8126 while the Sensex opened 16 points up at 26,506.
The 30-share barometer was down 70.25 points, or 0.27 per cent, to 26,419.31 at about 11:45am, with sectoral indices led by consumer durables, auto, realty and IT trading lower.
The index had lost 208.26 points in previous three sessions.
The NSE Nifty dropped 19.35 points, or 0.24 per cent, to 8,120.10.
India Vix quoting at 14.7700, down 3.16 per cent.
TOP FIVE SENSEX GAINERS INCLUDE: GAIL (1.92%), Lupin (1.46%), Cipla (1.14%), ICICI Bank (0.94%) and Reliance Industries (0.58%).
TOP FIVE SENSEX LOSERS WERE: Adani Ports (-1.32%), Asian Paints (-1.2%), Sun Pharma (-0.93%), L&T (-0.88%) and Maruti (-0.88%).
Brokers said apart from continued outflows by foreign funds, a weak trend in Asia tracking a sell—off on Wall Street and extending last week’s losses on concerns of an expected jump in US interest rates next year mainly pulled the indices down.
Japan’s Nikkei fell 0.22 per cent while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng shed 0.84 per cent in early trade today. Shanghai Composite too shed 0.19 per cent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 0.04 per cent lower in Friday’s trade.
A report by SMC Global said “Asian markets opened lower and US markets closed lower due to geopolitical tension that a Chinese warship seized an underwater U.S. Navy drone in international waters off the coast of the Philippines. Tension between two biggest economies would stretch further and may break the upward movement of the US market for short run.New residential construction in the U.S. saw a steep drop in the month of November, according to a report released by the Commerce Department.The report said housing starts plummeted by 18.7 percent to an annual rate of 1.090 million in November from the revised October estimate of 1.340 million.Economists had expected housing starts to dip to a rate of 1.230 million from the 1.323 million originally reported for the previous month.”
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