Bearish trends grip bourses, financial stocks suffer
Mumbai, Maharashtra: Equity benchmark indices traded substantially lower during early hours on Wednesday in line with their Asian peers amid inflation fears globally. At 10:45 am, the BSE S&P Sensex was down by 396 points or 0.81 per cent at 49,766 while the Nifty 50 slipped by 122 points or 0.82 per cent to 14,728. Sectoral indices at the National Stock Exchange were mixed with Nifty financial service and private bank sliding by 1.1 per cent each, IT by 1 per cent and auto by 0.6 per cent. But Nifty PSU bank rose by 1.8 per cent. Among stocks, home loan lender HDFC fell by 2 per cent to Rs 2,414.10 per share while Hindustan Unilever dropped by 1.9 per cent to Rs 2,354.
IndusInd Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and ICICI Bank also traded by nearly 1 per cent lower. The other prominent losers were Tech Mahindra, Mahindra & Mahindra, JSW Steel and Bharat Petroleum Corporation. However, those which gained were Power Grid Corporation, Larsen & Toubro, NTPC, Tata Motors and State Bank of India. Meanwhile, an extended sell-off drove Asian shares to their lowest in seven weeks as surging commodity prices and growing inflationary pressure in the United States prompted markets to bet on earlier rate hikes. MSCI's broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan slumped 1.5 per cent. South Korea's Kospi index skidded 0.7 per cent while Japan's Nikkei reversed early gains to be down 0.4 per cent.
