Wednesday, January 5 2005 20:10 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Mumbai: The market today (Jan 5, 2005) wilted under heavy sell-off across the spectrum wiping out investors' wealth to the tune of over Rs 58,000 crore in a virtual bloodbath and plunged to the depths of 6334.74 before minimising the losses to 192.17 points at close, the biggest since May 28.

After the intra-day fall of 295.24 points, the largest after May 17, the BSE Benchmark 30-share Index later made a strong turnaround during the last one hour to end the day at 6458.84 as against yesterday's close of 6651.01, a net loss of 192.17 points or 2.89 per cent.

Hedge funds were believed to be engaged in aggressive across-the-board selling, particularly in index counters.

Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which had pumped in over $ 9 billion in the Indian bourses during the last calendar year taking the prices to dizzy heights, suddenly went berserk resorting to stop-loss sales.

The negative reaction by FIIs was largely attributed to a warning by global rating agency Standard & Poor's over India's widening fiscal deficit that might hamper the economic growth.

Warning India of high fiscal deficit and debt burden, the rating agency said the country was unlikely to sustain high growth as was achieved by East Asian tiger economies.

Indian Financial Institutions and mutual funds undertook the salvage operations and reportedly made heavy purchases in a number of counters including top heavyweighted stocks.

Blue chips including Bajaj Auto, Hero Honda, Hindalco, Wipro, SBI, Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Satyam Computers, ONGC, HPCL, BHEL, Bharti Tele, Maurti Udyog, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Dr Reddy's showed hefty falls.