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Nifty drops 2.85 points

Equities fluctuated in a narrow range as market sentiment continued to remain depressed on the opening day of settlement following lack of buying support from financial institutions and bull operators on the National Stock Exchange in Bombay today.

The NSE-50 index opened marginally higher at 992.15 points and surged moderately ahead to touch a day's high of 997.80 points. It touched a day's low of 984 points to gain slightly towards the fag end and closed at 988.85, suffering a net loss of 2.85 points as against the last day's close of 991.70 points.

The Dollar NSE-50 (Defty) also followed the same trend and opened slightly higher at 884.30 points and closed at 882.20 points -- losing 1.70 points against yesterday's close of 883.90 points.

The Midcap index on the other hand, started slightly lower and then gained smartly to touch a high of 1105.60 points. It failed to maintain its uptrend and closed lower at 1097.05, yet, registering a net gain of 7.05 points against its previous close of 1090 points.

The total turnover displayed in the market was to the tune of Rs 13.47 billion from 44.66 million shares in 138,453 trades.

There were 52 securities which hit their price bands today, an NSE release said.

ITC continued to be the most actively traded security as it rose by Rs 20.06 to 645.69 as against its previous close. Unmatched to ITC's rise was Tata Tea who was the other security traded actively to close at Rs 1.3 billion followed closely by Castrol India at Rs 1.1 billion.

Others in the fray were Hind Lever at Rs 664.4 million, followed by MTNL at Rs 654.3, SBI-N at Rs 540.1, LML at Rs 387.8 million, Reliance at Rs 356.7 million, Corp Bank at Rs 195.1 million, Bajaj Auto at Rs 161.4 million, TELCO at Rs 140.4 million, ACC at Rs 118.8 million, SmithKl Pha at Rs 116.2. million.

These were followed by TISCO Rs 97.7 million, BHEL at Rs 84.5 million, Glaxo at Rs 78.4 million, L&T Rs 77.3 million, Ponds at Rs 7.61 million, BSES Rs 68 million, BPL at Rs 43.2 million, VBCL Rs 36.2 million, Raasi Cem Rs 33 million, ABB Rs 28.8 million, Sterlite Rs 27.8 million and ICICI Rs 25.

The top gainer for the day were MTNL (Rs 234.00), HDFC Bank (Rs 64.70), M&M (Rs 221.70), Ashok Leyland (Rs 32.35) and Cochin Refinery (Rs 158.00) while the top losers were Gujarat Ambuja (Rs 244.10), IPCL (Rs 53.75), Arvind Mills (Rs 52.65), Ponds (Rs 1053.55) and Grasim (Rs 275.10).

UNI