Mumbai: Led by FMCG major HLL (Hindustan Lever Limited), blue chip stocks suffered a sharp setback pushing the Sensex down by 26 points at close in lacklustre activity at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) today (Mar 4, 2004) due to profit booking by operators as also Indian Financial Institutions.

Snapping a three-day winning streak, the BSE Benchmark 30-share Index ended at 5815.87 as against yesterday's close of 5842.20, netting a fall of 26.33 points or 0.45 per cent. Initially, it had risen to the intra-day high at 5872.75 on some buying support from operators.

The day's weak spots RIL (Reliance industries Limited) and HLL that have high weightage in the index, dragged the Sensex sharply lower even as others like Grasim, ICICI Bank, ONGC, Infosys Tech, REL and SBI rallied smartly and mitigated the slide substantially.

HLL dropped by another 4.04 per cent on selling triggered by on-going product price war with its rival P&G, which is likely to affect the company's prospect.

Ruling out any impact on the market of ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corp) issue opening tomorrow (Mar 5), brokers said though the offer was expected to get good response from foreign investors, the price band of Rs 646-712 seemed to be too high.

Domestic institutions and retailers reportedly booked profits in key counters like RIL, L&T, Tata Motors, Tisco, Zee Telefilms, GACL, Bajaj Auto and ACC.

However, Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which were net buyers in the last two sessions, were believed to have made good purchases in select blue chip stocks.

The broad-based BSE-100 Index moved down by 9.69 points to 3007.02 from previous close of 3016.71.