Mumbai: After getting a pause for a day and exhibiting an early rally, share prices turned weak and declined with the Sensex falling by 26.05 points to close at 4788.80 on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) today (June 16, 2004) on fresh selling by operators in the absence of any worthwhile buying support from institutional investors.

Equity values opened on a firm note with the oil shares at the forefront following rise in the petroleum products, dealers said. However, shares met with heavy profit-booking later in the day and some of them even closed with marked losses, dealers said.

Most of the cement shares suffered a sharp setback on heavy offloading by operators following an increase in prices of coal which could be going to hit the bottomline of these companies, they added.

Some of the steel, power, chemical and other industries using coal also showed negative trend.

The BSE-30 share Sensitive Index opened on a firm note at 4837.36 as against yesterday's close of 4814.85 and immediately touched a high of 4863.63. Later, profit-selling pulled the index down to a low of 4772.10 before concluding at 4788.80, a net fall of 0.54 per cent.

The broad-based BSE-100 Index also dropped by 13.75 points to close at 2546.63 from previous close of 2560.38.

Meanwhile, dealers also partly attributed the initial rally to firm Wall Street advices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite Index moved up by 45.70 points and 25.61 points last night respectively.