Indian stock markets opened marginally lower on Tuesday with the key equity indices Sensex and Nifty starting in red as shares of blue-chip bankers such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank dragged phenomenally. BSE Sensex opened 46.64 points or 0.14% down at 32,876.48 and NSE Nifty lost 42.7 points or 0.42% to begin at 10,051.55 on Tuesday. All the sectors of National Stock Exchange hovered into negative territory in the morning deals on Tuesday with metal and PSU bankers leading the losses.
Shares of Future Retail jumped 2.28% to Rs 539 after the company received an approval from the Reserve Bank of India to increase the limit of its registered foreign portfolio Investors to 49% of its paid-up capital. Shares of RIL and Airtel traded mixed on Tuesday with RIL up 0.42% at Rs 899.1 and Airtel down 0.2% at Rs 400 after the Department of Telecom (DoT) had amended licence norms of service providers to increase the number of instalments for spectrum payments and radiowaves frequency holding limit.
Shares of India’s third-largest private sector lender Axis Bank were the biggest losers among the Sensex components. The stock of Axis Bank dropped 1.32% to Rs 513.4 after the telecom department ordered that bank guarantees from Axis Bank should not be taken as the country’s third-largest private sector lender had failed to honour a guarantee issued previously.
Earlier yesterday, Sensex breached the 33,000-mark slipping by nearly 253 points ending in red for the fifth straight session due to selling in metal, telecom and banking stocks.
US stocks dropped on Monday, with the S&P and Nasdaq suffering their worst day in just over five weeks, as concerns over increased regulation for large tech companies was spearheaded by a plunge in Facebook shares, Reuters said in a report. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 335.6 points, or 1.35 percent, to close at 24,610.91, the S&P 500 lost 39.09 points, or 1.42 percent, to 2,712.92 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 137.74 points, or 1.84 percent, to 7,344.24.