Global mkts stable; Nifty weakens due to ETF sell off

The market had a bad session on Wednesday. The Nifty slipped below 5700 in late afternoon trade. According to CNBC-TV18's managing editor Udayan Mukherjee exchange traded funds (ETF) have been driving the market for the last six months and money flowing out of ETFs led to this downfall.

Also read: Feared ETF selling has begun, Indian market vulnerable Below is the verbatim transcript of Udayan Mukherjee's comments Initially it looked like the market was falling in line with a similar theme for the first half of the day; the Nifty was flat, but a lot of the midcap stocks and smallcaps were doing well. However, post 2 pm the Nifty first hit 5,700 and then went all the down to 5,660. So, it was a day of setback. The mid-caps were doing much better but they turned tail in the last one hour of trade and the mid-cap index too closed deep in the red. The advance-decline also turned negative. Global markets were quite stable and although Europe was down, it was not down a whole lot at least in the last one hour of trade for us. So, the impulse for weakness came in on our own market. A big sell-off was seen in largecap names like Bharti, DLF, Larsen and Toubro (L&T), Reliance, National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), Tata Motors and Bajaj Auto. Although, there were handful of names which held out, like Sun Pharma, Ranbaxy Laboratories from the pharmaceutical basket and a couple of power stocks because of the positive Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) ruling. Adani Power and Tata Power were two names, which were among the bigger gainers today. Reliance Communications started strong, but then gave up its gains by the end of the session and that was the case for the mid-caps as well. The breadth was almost 3:1 early in the morning and by the time market closed, there were almost two declining names compared to one advancing stock. There were a lot of big losers, stocks from the infrastructure space like IVRCL, Punj Lloyd and GMR; sugar stocks like Renuka and Bajaj Hindustan. Jain Irrigation, Manappuram, Crompton, LIC Housing, and Titan also did badly today. A couple of other stocks that did well were Mangalore Chemicals because Zuari has been buying that stock from the market and TVS Motors on the back of its deal with BMW. Otherwise, it was a very disappointing session.