Stocks succumb to global headwinds

Mumbai: The stock market fell over 3 per cent joining the selloff in the global market sparked last week by multi decade high inflation as well as rising geopolitical tension between Russia and Ukraine, which pushed crude oil future contracts to fresh highs of $92-93 per barrel.

The Sensex dropped over 1850 points or more than 3 per cent intra-day, tracking weak Asian markets and US market's Friday closing. European markets' weak opening also added to selling pressure in the closing trades. The Sensex finally closed 1747 points or 3 per cent down at 56405 while Nifty-50 fell 532 points or 3.06 per cent to close at 16842.80.

Aggressive selling by the foreign portfolio investors of shares worth Rs 4,253.70 crore was the main reason for the worst performance of the Indian market among the Asian peers.

The domestic institutions were net buyers by Rs 2170.29 crore.

Market investors suffered notional loss of over Rs 8.47 lakh crore as BSE's market capitalisation dropped to over Rs 255.42 lakh crore in a day from Rs 263.89 lakh crore on Friday.

Barring TCS all other Sensex and Nifty-50 stocks closed with sharp declines running up to 6.50 per cent.

TCS gained 1.05 per cent on the BSE, as it fixed February 23 as record date for its Rs 18,000 crore share buyback announced earlier.

Among the worst performers were Tata Steel (-5.49 per cent), HDFC (-5.33 per cent), SBI (-5.20 per cent), ICICI Bank (-4.73 per cent), Kotak Mahindra Bank (-4.47 per cent) and Maruti (-4.33 per cent).

The broader market losses were even higher with BSE Mid-cap index down by 3.51 per cent and BSE Small-cap index down by 4.15 per cent.