Mumbai: After a smart rally during morning trading, equities later met with a strong resistance and some of the heavyweighted counters suffered a sharp setback pushing the SENSEX in negative territory at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on July 4 on late sell-off by operators and local funds.

Speculators that have made large commitments in several counters in the past couple of weeks, chose to book profits after domestic funds led by Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) reportedly pressed heavy sales at higher price levels.

The BSE Benchmark 30-share Index which rallied smartly to the intra-day high at 3661.87 at early stages of the session, later turned weak and ended at 3622.34 as against yesterday's close 3639.89, netting a fall of 17.55 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 Index, however, edged up by 3.04 points to 1838.69 from previous close of 1835.65.

Brokers also attributed selling by operators to slow down in FII activity during the week. Foreign funds were net buyers to the tune of Rs 370 crore in the first three sessions.

Considering the sell-off by operators, brokers expected a small correction during the next week with bulls having large positions in a number of scrips.

The sentiment was partly affected by the overnight fall on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended lower by 72.63 points and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell by 15.27 points yesterday.

HLL, Infosys Tech, Grasim, MTNL, Ranbaxy Lab and SBI were the major losers in index-based counters. However, Bajaj Auto, BHEL, CIPLA, HPCL, ITC, RIL and Zee Telefilms scored handsome gains on fresh buying.

PTI