Sensex ends 77 pts down; April inflation, Greece woes weigh

The BSE Sensex and NSE Nifty closed lower for the fifth consecutive session on Monday due to weakening rupee, waning of rate cut hopes after higher-than-expected inflation for April. Europe turmoil also added to the fuel.

The BSE benchmark fell as much as 168 points to hit an intraday low of 16,124.82, before closing down 77.14 points or 0.47% at 16,215.84. The NSE benchmark managed to settle above the 4900 level after struggling a lot the same level; index dropped 21.10 points to 4,907.80.

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According to Sudarshan Sukhani of s2analytics.com, trend of the market is down. He advised traders to maintain complete position on the short side.

Nifty futures on the National Stock Exchange stopped trading for around half an hour around 14 hours IST while trading in the cash markets continued as normal.

Higher-than-expected spike in inflation to 7.23% (from 6.89% MoM due to manufacturing and food inflation) for April faded hopes of further rate cut by the Reserve Bank of India.

Portfolio manager PN Vijay says this will further fuel the bearish trend for equities. “The mood of the market is now governed by trading activity, so we will follow the global pattern with a bit of blips depending on domestic factors,” he said.

European markets fell quite sharply ahead of Greek's politicians' last attempt to form government today. If they fail to form a coalition government, President will announce new elections. Experts feel that hope of government formation looks low now. Losing of elections by Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany’s most populous state ‘North Rhine-Westphalia’ on Sunday (indicating a tough fight for winning forthcoming elections) also added fuel to the fire. France's CAC, Germany's DAX and Britain's FTSE were down around 2%.

The Indian rupee was off day's low at 53.79 to the dollar, down 16 paise. It was near to the 53.90 a dollar during the day.

Private sector lenders ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank were down 2% and 1.7%, respectively. Axis Bank and State Bank of India lost 0.7% each.

Shares of Tata Motors, country's largest commercial vehicle maker tanked 2.4% while Maruti and M&M gained 0.5-0.8%. Bajaj Auto, two-wheeler producer rallied 1.8%.

Index heavyweight and oil & gas producer Reliance Industries tumbled 2.3% while its rival ONGC was down 1.3%.

Realty major DLF went down 2.6%. India's largest software services exporter TCS was down 0.3% whereas rival Infosys jumped over 1%.

Engineering and construction company Larsen & Toubro shot up over 5% intraday after the company forecasted 15-20% growth in order inflows and topline in FY13. L&T reported a better than expected growth of 13.9% year-on-year in its profit after tax of Rs 1,920 crore for the fourth quarter of FY12 while its topline came in lower than expectations at Rs 18,461 crore, a growth of 21% YoY. Analysts on average had expected net profit at Rs 1,691 crore and total income at Rs 18,843 crore

Results reactions: IVRCL and Orchid Chemical crashed 12-13%. Adani Power and HeidelbergCement India were down 3.5-4%.

The BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices tanked 1% each. About two shares declined for every share rising on the National Stock Exchange.