Mumbai: Led by Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), old-economy counters met with profit- selling and turned weak on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on March 8, pushing the SENSEX down by 33.50 points to close at 3656.77.

Index-based cyclical shares like HLL, RIL, BHEL, Grasim, HPCL, Hindalco, ITC, L&T, and ACC suffered sharp to moderate setback as local institutions and operators turned sellers, forcing the SENSEX to close in negative territory.

While select software stocks, which were weak at the outset following a fall of 8.77 points in the NASDAQ Composite Index on March 7 night, notched remarkable gains towards the fag-end on good buying by Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) and mitigate the index fall to some extent.

Mirroring the trend, the BSE-30 share sensitive index opened slightly better at 3692.61 and immediately touched a high of 3703.79.

Later, it met with strong resistance and gradually declined to a low of 3645.90 before closing at 3656.77 as against March 7 close of 3690.27, a fall of 0.91 per cent.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also dropped by 12.64 points to 1780.37 from previous close of 1793.01.

Local institutions and domestic funds booked profits in heavyweight old-economy scrips while FIIs reportedly picked up shares of Infosys Tech, Satyam Computer and few others.

Second-line software counters were in limelight and finished with substantial gains following good buying support from speculators, dealers said.

PTI