Mumbai: A sharp rally in old-economy heavyweights helped the SENSEX to close above the 4400-mark at 4402.05, up by 19.48 points, at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on September 29 on sustained buying by foreign funds as well as operators.

However, higher levels attracted some profit selling towards the fag end, which brought down the index marginally.

Refinery counters, including most of the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) stocks, attracted heavy buying from Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), resulting in sharp gains in RIL, IPCL, HPCL, BPCL, IOC, ONGC, Kochi Refinery and Chennai Petro, dealers said.

Cement shares such as Grasim, L&T, GACL and ACC also finished remarkably higher on good buying support.

Elsewhere, other index-based counters like BSES, MTNL, Hindalco, SBI, Telco and Tisco closed with good gains.

The BSE-30 share sensitive index opened higher at 4392.87 as against last Friday's close of 4382.57 and moved in a narrow range between 4426.30 and 4385.54 before concluding at 4402.05, showing a rise of 0.44 per cent.

The broad-based BSE-100 shot up by 41.13 points, exhibiting a good strength in second-line stocks, to close at 2290.02 from previous close of 2248.89.

However, IT shares displayed a mixed bag with front-line shares registering sharp to moderate losses while some of the second-line stocks showing firm trend. On the Wall Street the Nasdaq Composite Index declined by 25.17 points last Friday.

Depicting the trend in PSUs counters, the BSE-PSU index flared up by 110.55 points or 3.94 per cent to 2919.54 from last weekend's close of 2808.99.

PTI