The fall in the Indian Stockmarket is unabated with the Sensex shedding more than 770 points today(13th March) resulting in a loss of 4.8%. The Nifty also lost 248 points to close at 4624 points.
Since October,2007 when the Sensex was around 17998 points, there has been a consistent erosion in the values of the stocks and today’s(13th March 2008) quote at 15220 points mean that the Market has slumped below its low of 15357 points in Jan,2008. Out of a total of 2708 stocks traded today, 2352 registered losses. This inidcates the seriousness of the negative breadth of the market.
Hammering of Heavy weights like Reliance Energy, Reliance Communications, DLF etc., continued. This was not restricted only to these stocks and in fact other heavy weights like Tata Steel, BHEL etc were not spared. Leading Banking Stocks like HDFC Bank had borne the brunt and with the fears of subprime crisis driving these stocks to lower levels, they may not revive in the near future. Midcap and Smallcap dropped by about 5.5%. The gains registered by smallcap stocks when the Markets were in an upward movement have since been completely wiped out putting the small investors into deep losses.
The main reasons attributed for this fall as usual were fears of U.S. Recession, surge in the Crude Oil prices, poor performance of the Asian Markets and uncertainty in the way U.S. economy would turnout as it has failed to respond positively to the measures taken by the U.S Federal Reserves.
The Asian Markets failed to cheer the investors. The Hang Seng slumped by 5%, the Nikki lost 3% and the Shangai Composite indices gave away 2.4%.
With the Markets behaving in an erratic way, the investors are shying away from both the primary and secondary markets. For a longtime to come, there may not be any IPO’s and Companies which had planned for them either has to postpone it indefinitely or shelve the plans.
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