Market crawls back to end lower, Nifty down by six pts

Mumbai, Jan 31 (PTI) Fumbling and tumbling in the marketgot a saviour in form of low level buying from its oversoldpositions, though the benchmark S&P CNX Nifty ended marginallylower by six points at the National Stock Exchange (NSE) heretoday.

The 50-share index shuttled between 5,526.85 and 5,416.65before settling at 5,505.90, down 6.25 points or 0.11 per centover its previous close.

The session began with steep fall on weekend sell-off inUS over unrest in Egypt and mixed Asian cues with key indexcontinued to get hammered as session progressed touching theday''s low point.

The market showed some sign of recovery in mid-afternoontrade on the back of low level buying frontline counters andshortcovering which helped the index to touch positive terrainbefore slipping back to post a moderate loss.

"The market is likely to see short-covering bounces, butthe overall confidence is shaken due to marco worries andfears of liquidity withdrawal by foreign funds," traders said.

Technology shares, which were not part of the sell-offstarted showing some kind of weakening tendency along withother fundamentaly strong counters, which is worrisome, theyadded.

JP Associates, BPCL, ITC, Reliance Infra, RelianceCapital, HDFC, Rcom, Bharti Airtel, Sun Pharma and InfosysTech were the top losers from the Nifty.

However, Seimens which shot up on the back buy back newsalong with Dr Reddy, ONGC, Hindalco, GAIL, BHEL, Cairn, M&M,L&T and Ranbaxy registered good gains.

Total turnover in the cash segment declined to Rs14,222.63 crore from Rs 15,048 crore last Friday. A total of7,073.58 lakh shares changed hands in 64,15,314 trades. Themarket capitalisation stood at Rs 64,41,491 crore.