MUMBAI: Continued profit booking by institutional investors dragged the benchmark Nifty and Sensex indices down by a percent each. The Nifty closed down 174.65 points to 17938.4 and the Sensex plumbed 656.04 points to 60098.82 as FIIs sold a provisional `2705 crore worth of shares. DIIs sold `195.07 crore worth of shares.
Thirty five of the Nifty constituents fell against 15 that rose. The fall was led by Infosys and Shree Cement, both of which corrected 3%, Asian Paints, Adani Ports and Hindustan Unilever, which fell over 2.5% each. The top 5 gainers included ONGC, Tata Motors and UPL.
Derivatives data on index futures — Nifty and Bank Nifty — indicates the downward pressure could continue . FIIs sold futures worth `1,262 crore on Wednesday. They also increased their index put option outstanding positions to by almost 73000 contracts to 272607 contracts.
Resistance kicks in at 18037 and support at 17870 for Nifty. Among major laggards were Asian Paint, HUL, Nestle, Bajaj Finance, Wipro and Kotak Bank. Among gainers were SBI, Tata Steel, Maruti, Axis Bank , Tech Mahindra, PowerGrid, M&M and RIL.