Unabated selling in the Indian equities continued on Wednesday forcing the Indian markets to extend its losses as the key indices settled at new 15 month?s low before ending in the negative territory for the seventh consecutive trading session. After remaining fairly positive in the early trading session partly on the back of short covering and flat performance by the key Asian markets, benchmark indices continued to nosedive paring their early gains in the wake of fresh selling pressure emerging at the fag end of the session.

The 30-share Sensex of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) shed close to 400 points intra-day to finally end the day at 12,575.80 points posting a loss of 100.39 points or 0.79% while the wider S&P CNX Nifty of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) posted a loss of 44.40 points or 1.15% to close the day at 3,816.70 points.

Dealers said, the fresh selling was trigered in the wake of lower than expected Q1 results of the key companies like HDFC, Mindtree and others.

With markets correcting sharply in recent past some experts believe that an intermittent positive rally is on the corners but the concerning factors such as rising crude prices and lackadaisical attitude of the Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) would still weigh the Indian markets downwards.

Kaushal Shah, deputy head of research, LKP Shares said, ?Markets have already corrected a lot and some relief rally though mainly a technical one is around the corner. A slew of events in the form of the trust vote for the UPA government and the RBI meet would be the next trigger for the market. However the overall sentiment would depend on how the oil prices pans out in the coming months.?

The uncertainly hovering around the interest rate sensitive sectors in the form spiraling inflation having a direct link to the rise in the interest rate continued to bore the brunt on the realty, banking and auto stocks. Fearing one more monetary measure to tame inflation by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its next meet scheduled on July 29, many of these stocks touched their new 52-week low. HDFC bank, ICICI bank, Unitech were few of the prominent stocks which touched their new 52-week low.

Overall the BSE Realty was drifted down by 284.33 points or 6.31% to end the day at 4,219 points.