Sensex down 100 pts, Nifty below 21,400; IT shares slip

After starting the trading session with modest gains, equity benchmark indices soon erased gains and slipped into red owing to selling pressure in IT and select financial shares in Tuesday’s trading session.

The S&P BSE Sensex touched a high of 71,569 in early deals, but thereafter slipped into the negative zone and was quoting with a loss 150 points at 71,164. The NSE Nifty 50 too declined over 40 points and quoted below the 21,400 level.

Nestle India up 1.5 per cent was the top gainer among the Sensex 30 stocks, after the company fixed January 05 as the record date for stock split. Index heavyweights Reliance Industries and ITC were the other prominent gainers.

On the flip side, TCS, IndusInd Bank, HDFC Bank, Mahindra & Mahindra and Asian Paints were the notable losers.

In the broader market, the BSE MidCap index was up 0.1 per cent, while the SmallCap added 0.6 per cent.

Among individual stocks, Vedanta and Siemens were in focus after the former announced Rs 11 per share dividend, and the latter initiated measures to demerge its energy business into a separate entity. Vedanta gained over 2 per cent, while Siemens was up nearly a per cent.

Elsewhere in Asia, markets were mixed even as the Bank of Japan maintained its ultra-loose monetary settings on Tuesday in a widely expected move, underscoring policymakers’ preference to await more clues on whether wages will rise enough to keep inflation durably around its 2 per cent target.