Banks, RIL drag Sensex 311 pts down, Nifty below 17,850; Adani Ent falls 6%

CLOSING BELL

Stock market highlights: Sell-off engulfed equity markets in the second half of the session with banking and financial services stocks taking the deepest plunge. The S&P BSE Sensex index fell 311 points, or 0.5 per cent, to settle at 60,692, while the Nifty50 index gave up 17,850-mark to close at 17,845, down 100 points or 0.56 per cent.

Maruti Suzuki, Kotak Bank, SBI, HDFC, Axis Bank, Titan, Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Nestle India, and RIL were the top Sensex laggards, falling in the range of 1 per cent to 1.4 per cent. Tech M, Ultratech Cement, Power Grid, and Infosys, meanwhile, lent some support. 

In the broader market, the S&P BSE MidCap and SmallCap indices outperformed the benchmarks as they fell 0.12 per cent and 0.16 per cent, respectively.

Individually, shares of Cipla dipped 7 per cent to Rs 956.20 on the BSE in Monday's intra-day trade after the company said that the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) issued Form 483 with 8 observations after the inspection of its Pithampur manufacturing facilities. READ MORE

Shares of Samvardhana Motherson International (SAMIL), on the flipside, surged 6 per cent at Rs 84.20 on the BSE in Monday's intra-day trade after the company announced the acquisition of 100 per cent stake of SAS Autosystemtechnik GmbH, Germany (SAS) at an enterprise value of € 540 million(around Rs 4,800 crore). The transaction will be funded by a mix of debt and internal accruals. READ MORE

Among sectoral indices, the Nifty PSU Bank index fell over 1 per cent, followed by the Nifty Bank, Financial Services, Private Bank, and Realty indices dipped 0.9 per cent each. The Nifty IT index, on the other hand, gained 0.54 per cent.