Mumbai: Share prices opened barely steady and moved downwards on fresh profit selling at the morning session on the stock exchange today (Feb 05, 2004).

The BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange) 30-share Sensitive Index opened steady at 5756.30 as against yesterday's (Feb 04, 2004) close of 5756.76 and moved irregularly in a range between 5783.45 and 5718.92 before being quoted at 5726.84 at 11:00 hours (IST).

From the index-based scrips, only ACC, Bajaj Auto, Cipla, HPCL, ONGC and Ranbaxy were quoted marginally higher while others were quoted remarkably lower impacting the Sensex negatively.

Particularly the software stocks suffered a sharp to moderate setback on profit booking by operators.