The short-term support is at 5,300 on the Nifty

|The market traded lower, tracking weak Asian markets in morning trade. The decline, after two days of gains, was on account of the ongoing debt crisis in Europe and news that a ministerial panel is likely to meet this week to decide on diesel and domestic LPG prices.

The Sensex and Nifty opened at 18,269 and 5,457 respectively which were the day's high, too. The market then started its downward journey. The market fell to the day's low in the post-noon trade, after which it was range-bound till the end of the session.

The Nifty traded close to its support of 5,340. The Sensex fell 333 points to close at 17,993 while Nifty fell 100 points to close at 5,387.

The indices also hit their two-month lows around the same time with Sensex falling to 17,971 (its lowest intra-day since 24 March 2011) and Nifty was at 5,373 (its lowest mid-session decline since 22 March 2011). The advance-decline ratio on the National Stock Exchange was 274:1122.

A gap-down opening of the key European markets, on account of debt issues of some countries in the region, and US futures trading lower also added to the woes back home.

The broader indices were equally hammered in today's trade with the BSE Mid-cap index declining 1.41% and the BSE Small-cap index falling by 1.57%.

Barring the BSE Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and the BSE Consumer Goods (CD) indices, all other sectoral gauges settled in the red. The top losers were rate-sensitive sectors like BSE Capital Goods (down 2.95%), BSE Power (down 2.91%), BSE Bankex (down 2.85%), BSE Realty (down 2.79%) and BSE Metal (down 2.62%). BSE FMCG gained 0.59% and BSE CD rose 0.49%.

ITC (up 2.29%) was the lone gainer on the Sensex today. The top losers were BHEL (down 6.69%), ICICI Bank (down 3.61%), Reliance Infrastructure (down 3.57%), Tata Motors (down 3.36%) and Tata Steel (down 3.30%).

The government will soon finalise the roadmap to raise a whopping Rs40,000 crore through disinvestment during the current fiscal. It will include sale of equity in blue chip companies like SAIL, ONGC, Power Finance Corporation (PFC) and Hindustan Copper (HCL). The government has already raised Rs1,162 crore by divesting 5% stake in PFC in May.

The follow-on public offer of SAIL is likely to hit the market next month and ONGC in July. Share sale programme of HCL is yet to take a concrete shape.

Markets in Asia settled sharply lower on concerns that the debt crisis in Europe will hurt the outlook for exporters in the region. This apart, preliminary data showed that China's manufacturing activity fell to a 10-month low of 51.1 in May from 51.8 in April, a sign that the rate-tightening measures has resulted in a slowdown. A strike by employees at a South Korean engine-parts supplier pulled down auto stocks in Seoul.

Also, speculations of a fall in demand for crude and metals due to the European crisis, resulted in commodity-related stocks ending lower.

The Shanghai Composite sank 2.90%, the Hang Seng tumbled 2.11%, the Jakarta Composite plunged 2.44%, the KLSE Composite fell by 0.78%, the Nikkei 225 tanked 1.52%, the Straits Times contracted 1.83%, the Seoul Composite slid 2.64% and the Taiwan Weighted closed 1.01% lower.

Back home, foreign institutional investors were net sellers of stocks worth Rs181.55 crore on Friday while domestic institutional investors were net buyers of stocks worth Rs398.19 crore.