Mumbai. There was widespread selling in the domestic stock markets on Thursday amid concerns over rising tensions in West Asia and benchmark indices fell by more than two per cent. A huge fall of 1,769 points was recorded in Sensex and 547 points in Nifty.
Analysts said continuous withdrawal of foreign funds and rising crude oil prices affected investor sentiment.
This was the fourth consecutive day of decline in the stock market. Amidst the big fall, investors’ wealth decreased by Rs 9.78 lakh crore in a single day.
BSE’s 30-share index Sensex fell by 1,769.19 points or 2.10 percent and closed at 82,497.10 points. At one time during trading, it had fallen by 1,832.27 points to 82,434.02 points. National Stock Exchange’s Nifty also fell by 546.80 points or 2.12 percent to 25,250.10 points.
Among the Sensex companies, Larsen & Toubro, Reliance Industries, Axis Bank, Asian Paints, Tata Motors, Bajaj Finance, Maruti, Bajaj Finserv, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Titan, Adani Ports and HDFC Bank witnessed significant decline. The all-round decline of the market can be gauged from the fact that out of 30 Sensex companies, only JSW Steel was successful in gaining.
Vinod Nair, head of research at Geojit Financial Services, said, “There was a sharp decline in domestic markets after Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel. In fact, now the fear of Israel taking retaliatory action against oil producer Iran has increased.” Which can give a bigger shape to this struggle.” Nair said, “SEBI’s new rules for the Futures and Options (F&O) segment have also increased the concern related to reduced number of deals in the market. With this, due to the attractive market valuation in China, foreign investors have now diverted their capital there, due to which the pressure on Indian stocks has increased. According to stock market data, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) had made a net sale of shares worth Rs 5,579.35 crore on Tuesday.
In the broader market, the BSE Midcap index fell significantly by 2.27 percent, while the Smallcap index recorded a decline of 1.84 percent. Among the sector wise indices, the realty segment witnessed the biggest decline of 4.49 percent. The capital products segment lost 3.18 percent and the vehicle segment lost 2.94 percent. Not a single index failed to remain in positive territory.
Devarsh Vakil, Deputy Head (Retail Research), HDFC Securities, said, “Fears of foreign portfolio investors and FIIs moving out of India and towards China remained dominant. “This was strengthened by higher valuations of domestic markets compared to China.” In other markets of Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng declined while Japan’s Nikkei closed with gains. China’s stock markets will remain closed for the rest of the week due to public holidays.
Most of the European markets were trading with losses in the afternoon. On Wednesday, American markets closed with a slight gain. Global oil standard Brent crude rose 1.37 percent to $ 74.91 per barrel amid increasing tensions in West Asia.
The stock markets were closed on Wednesday on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi Jayanti. On Tuesday, BSE Sensex fell 33.49 points to 84,266.29 points and NSE Nifty closed with a slight fall of 13.95 points to 25,796.90 points.