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Rise in badla rate, FIs' offloading, Budget uncertainty dampen mood; Sensex down 51 points to 3303.89

Pivotals declined sharply at the Bombay Stock Exchange following heavy offloading by operators coupled with lack of buying support from institutional investors, pushing down the BSE Sensex by 51 points on the first day of current settlement today.

Marketmen attributed sharp fall in the share prices to the rise in the annualised badla (the rate at which carry-forward deals are struck) rates to nearly 32 per cent as against last week's interest rates of 24 per cent.

Barring Glaxo and Burrough's Welcome from the pharma group, none of the scrips either from pharma or infotech sectors (the current market favourites), gained today, an analyst at the leading private broking firm said.

Operators are uncertain about the Budget and the scare might have led to the fall in the share prices. The analyst sighted another reason for the bearish trend and added that none of the operators wants to have any outstanding position prior to the Budget. Nobody is ready to take a risk.

Reflecting the bearish mood, the 30-scrip BSE Sensex opened higher at 3370.60, touched the day's high of 3397.33 points, fell to the day's low of 3300.67 points before closing at 3303.89 points, showing a net loss of 51.03 points from the Friday's close of 3354.92 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also lost by 20.55 points to 1458.90 points as against the previous close of 1479.45 points.

Pentafour Software, Global Telesystems, PSI Data, Digital Equipment, HCL-HP, Satyam Computers, Digital Equipment, Reliance emerged as the major losers. Castrol, Colgate, Nestle, Tisco, Telco, Tata Tea and SBI also suffered moderate losses, dealers said.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices eased by 5.13 and 1.89 points to 337.60 and 132.56 points as against the last week's close of 342.73 and 134.45 points.

Total turnover on the BOLT system reported during the day was Rs 13.93 billion.

Pentafour Software topped the list of turnover by registering highest turnover of Rs 2.38 billion, followed by Reliance Rs 1.52 billion, Satyam Computer Rs 1.43 billion.

Other actively traded counters were ITC (Rs 769 million), Tata Tea (Rs 593.4 million), Digital Equipment (Rs 358.1 million), Tisco (Rs 350.9 million), Glaxo India (Rs 339 million), L&T (Rs 334.8 million), Telco (Rs 316.2 million), SBI (Rs 308.7 million), IPCL (Rs 292.3 million), Zee Telefilms (Rs 284.3 million), ACC (Rs 236.8 million) and MTNL (Rs 150.9 million).

UNI

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