Mumbai: A heavy bout of profit-selling at the fag-end wiped out early gains at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on September 3 and the SENSEX was pulled down by nearly 110 points from the day's high, thus truncating the straight six-session gaining string.

A steep decline in SENSEX could be gauged by a sharp fall in 27 out of 30 index-based scrips including heavyweights like RIL, HLL, Infosys Tech, ITC, BHEL, Grasim, ICICI Bank, L&T, MTNL, SBI, Satyam Computer and Telco.

Share prices resumed on a firm note and moved in a narrow range up to mid-session. Later in the day, it met with strong resistance at higher levels as heavy profit booking caused a steep fall in prices towards the end.

Pharma stocks, which were in keen demand recently, suffered a sharp setback on large scale offloading by foreign funds. Banking and Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) segments also registered marked falls on selling.

Mirroring the trend, the BSE-30 share sensitive index opened higher at 4361.87 as against yesterday's close of 4339.20 and soon touched a high of 4367.87. Thereafter, it nose-dived to a low of 4248.86, before recovering marginally to close at 4257.94, still showing a hefty fall of 81.26 points or 1.87 per cent over the previous close.

The broad-based BSE-100 also dipped by 43.39 points to end at 2240.76 from previous close of 2284.15.

Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), who were net buyers in the last couple of days, pressed sales in select heavyweighted counters while local institutions also booked profits in some of the index-based shares.

PTI