Mumbai: Barring a smart rise in banking counters, select old economy heavyweights, led by tobacco major ITC declined moderately pushing down the SENSEX by another 17.33 points to close at 3311.06 on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on December 17 following fresh selling by operators as well as foreign funds.

Majority of banking counters, after initial setback, recovered smartly towards the end on fresh enquiries from local funds and retail investors and closed with gains.

However, some of the other index-based old-economy stocks like Grasim, GACL, L&T ACC, BHEL, BSES, HDFC, HPCL, RIL and Telco suffered sharp to moderate setback.

Front-line IT stocks wiped out their initial dominance and remained somewhat stable while second-rung software scrips reacted downwards on heavy institutional selling despite a firm trend on the Nasdaq where the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index shot up by 37.91 points on December 16 night.

Polaris Software suffered a sharp setback and finished 4.36 per cent down following news that the CEO of the company was arrested by Indonesian police in Jakarta over some dispute between the company and a local bank.

The BSE-30 share sensitive index opened higher at 3338.88 and immediately touched a high of 3347.92. Later, it dropped below yesterday's closing level of 3328.39 and remained in negative territory for the most part of the day before ending at 3311.06, a rise of 17.33 points or 0.52 per cent.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also dipped by 7.04 points to 1630.56 from previous close of 1637.60.

PTI