MUMBAI: With Brent crude prices spiking again to over $105 per barrel, US Treasury bond yields rising to a more than two-decade high and the rupee at close to 96.8/$, strong foreign fund selling pulled the markets sharply down on Thursday. Reliance Industries, HDFC Bank and Bharti Airtel led the slide as sensex lost 1,045 points or 1.4% to close at 71,593 points. Nifty on NSE lost 371 points or 1.6% to close at 22,232 points.The day’s slide wiped out Rs 10 lakh crore worth of investors’ wealth with the aggregate market capitalisation of companies listed on BSE at Rs 461 lakh crore, official data showed.
Post Thursday’s close, sensex was the worst-performing index this year among most of the major benchmarks around the world. Compared to a 16% year-to-date drop in sensex, Nifty is down 15%, Hang Seng in Hong Kong is down nearly 10% while Shanghai Composite for mainland China is down 5.3%.At the other end of the spectrum is Japan’s Nikkei that’s up 33% while Brazil’s iBovespa is up 28% and technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite, boosted by the strong rally in AI stocks, is up 17.6%.Till Oct 1, sensex had an eight-week losing streak, the longest in 25 years, which started in the week ended Aug 7 when the index had closed at 78,499 points. From that level, the index is now down a little over 6,900 points or 8.8%. In case sensex closes below its Oct 1 level of 71,910 points, the nine-week losing streak would be its longest on record.Since its Aug 7 close, thanks to the continuous selling, investors’ wealth loss stands at Rs 32.3 lakh crore. This is despite the addition of several companies to the list of stocks traded on BSE after their IPO which includes NSE, currently having a market capitalisation of Rs 4.3 lakh crore. Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) sold stocks worth nearly Rs 13,000 crore on a net basis. This was one of the biggest single-session net outflows by FPIs in recent times.
