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Celestial threat to satellite hammers down Sensex; down 28 points, 2976.17

Pivotals suffered a moderate setback on speculative selling pressure on the Bombay Stock Exchange today.

The dealers attributed the downtrend to the possible threat to the satellites from a comet predicted by the satellites of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The United Nations' new stand over the arms inspection in Iraq and withdrawal of some of the staff from there have made the market participants cautious about the future trading activity, marketmen said.

Dealers said, worried over the two factors, the marketmen resorted to selling in the scrips where they had long-term positions.

The NSE in its broadcast message for its members informed that "comet SSP/ Temple-Tuttle" is expected hit the earth atmoshere over India during November 14-20, and alerted members about the possible threat to the exchange satellite to avoid any panic in the market. However, it has also attracted selling pressure, in some of the counters on the BSE too, dealers said.

The market opened on a firm note, and the BSE Sensex hovered at 3000 and above level most part of the day. However, heavy squaring off by market participants towards the end brought down the prices, leading BSE brokers said.

Mirroring the trend, the BSE Sensex started at 3017.45 points, touched the day's high of 3027.20 points, fell to the day's low of 2974.61 points before closing at 2976.17 points, showing a net loss of 28.50 points as against the previous close of 3004.67 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also lost by 10.26 points at 1325.35 points from the previous close of 1335.51 points.

The foreign institutional investors made purchases at the select counters like ITC, ICICI, Telco, Mahindra, Grasim, SBI while local institutional investors bought shares of HDFC, Hindalco and Telco, dealers said.

The Unit Trust of India reportedly pressed sales at the prominent counters, they said.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices closed lower by 2.18 and 0.83 points to 306.04 and 120.51 points from the previous close of 308.22 and 121.34 points respectively.

Total turnover on the screen-based trading system of the BSE stood at Rs 13.85 billion.

ITC registered the highest turnover of Rs 2.51 billion, followed by Pentafour Software Rs 1.77 billion, Zee Telefilms Rs 1.27 billion, Satyam Computers Rs 1.19 billion and SBI Rs 1.01 billion.

Other actively traded counters were Reliance (Rs 865 million), Telco (Rs 437.7 million), Castrol India (Rs 279.4 million), Tata Tea (Rs 268 million), NIIT (Rs 247.1 million), Digital Equipment (Rs 201.2 million), L&T (Rs 183.5 million), ACC (Rs 176.6 million), Hindalco (Rs 163.3 million) and ICICI Limited (Rs 160.4 million).

UNI

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