Mumbai: After early smart rally, equities ran out of steam and select heavy weighted counters registered sharp falls, pushing the Sensex down by 49 points at close on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) today (Nov 18) on heavy unloading by operators amidst drastic slow down in Foreign Institutional Investor (FII) activity.

The BSE benchmark 30-share index rallied smartly to the intra-day high at 4,981.48 during initial part of the session, but later met a strong resistance and fell back after mid-session to end at 4,891.13 as against yesterday's close of 4,940.23, a net loss of 49.10 points or 0.99 per cent.

The broad-based BSE-100 index moved down by 23.12 points to 2,527.97 from previous close of 2,551.09.

Despite weak global advices, operators were seen creating fresh positions in several blue-chip counters at the early stages. However, speculators later resorted to unloading in the absence of any worthwhile purchases from the principal driving force, FIIs.

FIIs have severely slowed down activity since last week and made net investments of a meagre Rs 12 crore last Friday (Nov 14), an indication that they might turn sellers during concluding part of the year.

Old economy stocks bore the brunt of sell-off with key scrips like Grasim Ind, Tisco, Tata Motors, SBI, RIL, ONGC, L&T, ICICI Bank, Hero Honda, GACL, Dr Reddy's Lab, BSES, BHEL and ACC suffering a sharp setback.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday ended lower by over 57 points and the Nasdaq Composite Index by about 27 points.

PTI