The Hindu Business Line : Bourses witness lowest turnover

As rain and water-logging continued to hammer the financial capital for the fourth consecutive day today, activity in equities and indices movement were nearly at a stand-still for lack of participation. The stock markets reported lowest total turnover of the year at Rs 21,608 crore including the turnover in the derivatives segment on both NSE and BSE. On the NSE, the total traded value was merely Rs 4,838.31 crore in the cash segment against the Monday's figure of Rs 5,061.44 crore.

Stock markets opened positive but remained weak throughout the day and finally closed in the negative territory. All the major and sectoral indices of the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange declined today. The BSE Sensex lost 0.31 per cent to finish at 10,662.22 points, while S&P CNX Nifty shed 0.39 per cent to close at 3138.65. Banking stocks were in the limelight as the NSE's Bank Nifty index gained 1.55 per cent and BSE Bankex by 1.18 per cent.

In terms of turnover value, Reliance, Tata Steel, VSNL, SBI and the new Nifty entrant Suzlon Energy were among the active stocks.

"Rain and poor infrastructure in Mumbai once again exposed the weakness of the country's secondary equities markets; the activity remains primarily Mumbai-centric after extinction of regional bourses following the securities market fraud of 2001," said an official of a large broking firm having branches all over the country.

Attendance at the broking firms, institutions and market related entities varied between 5 and 30 per cent. Some dealers at the institutional broking firms said that as in some parts of the city, telephone and mobile communication were severely affected, outstation orders came to a virtual halt during the latter part of the trading session.