Sensex, Nifty fall in early trade on weak global trends

Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty fell in early trading on Friday amid weak trends in global markets and as investors preferred to stay on the sidelines ahead of the release of domestic inflation data.

BSE Sensex, which includes 30 shares, fell 326 points to 61,578.15 points in the opening session. At 10.55 am, the Sensex was trading at 61,858.84, down 45.68 points.

Similarly, NSE Nifty fell by 102.45 points to a low of 18194.55, recouping some of its losses and was trading at 18282.20, down 14.80 points from its previous close.

Big losers and winners

Among Sensex companies, Larsen & Toubro, Tata Steel, Infosys, Asian Paints, Power Grid, Bajaj Finserv, IndusInd Bank, and ITC were the major laggards.

Among the winners were Mahindra, Mahindra, Tata Motors, Access Bank and Titan.

In Asia, Seoul, Shanghai, and Hong Kong markets traded lower, while Tokyo traded in the green.

The US market finished mostly in negative territory on Thursday.

“Markets could falter in early trade on weakness in other Asian indices after US markets fell overnight. Profit booking is likely to be the favored topic as the advantage of lower US CPI and PPI optimism is seen to fade, with a fading feature,” he said. Prashanth Tapsi, Senior Vice President (Research), Mehta Equities Ltd. China’s growth concerns weigh on sentiment.

Inflation, International Investment Data

Domestic inflation for April and industrial production for March are due later today.

Meanwhile, Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, fell 0.45 percent to $74.59 a barrel.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) were net buyers on Thursday buying shares worth Rs 837.21 crore, according to exchange data.