With a bleak opening, the BSE Sensex is likely to halt a two-day rise in today’s session.

Overnight losses in the US and mixed signals from the Asian markets hit the Indian equities at the opening time.

Realty stocks were hammered badly followed by banking and consumer goods.

BSE Midcap was also down by 0.24%, while Smallcap index lost 0.05%.

The 30-share index, BSE Sensex, today (Friday Mar 20) opened at 8,951.34, down 50.41 points.

Asian stocks belled on a mixed note today, offsetting declinations by banking institutions amid disbelief US and Japanese decided to buy bonds will alleviate the financial disaster.

US stocks retreated on Thursday as weak economic reports and a selloff in bank stocks led the declines. Rising oil and gold prices, coupled with a weaker dollar accentuated the fall.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 86 points, or 1.2%, to 7,400.80. The S&P 500 index fell 10 points, or 1.3%, to 784.04. The Nasdaq Composite index shed almost 8 points or 0.5%, to 1,483.48.

At 10:00 a.m., Hang Seng index lost 182.46 points at 12,948.46, and Shanghai Composite declined 8.49 points to trade at 2,257.26.

European stocks surged after the Federal Reserve announcement to buy $300 billion of government bonds to lower borrowing costs, and the Bank of England declared that it would buy corporate debt to strengthen financial markets.

Barclays zoomed 17% as a measure of bank shares climbed up to the highest in three weeks.

FTSE 100 increased 11.94 points at 3,816.93, CAC 40 grew 16.65 points at 2,776.99 and DAX advanced 47.14 points to end at 4,043.46.

At 09:59 a.m., the 30-share index slipped 45.66 points at 8,956.09 and the NSE Nifty was down 10.80 at 2,796.35.

The major gainers in the Sensex pack were Sterlite Industries (India) (4.91%), Sun Pharmaceutical Industries (1.82%), NTPC (1.51%), Housing Development Finance Corporation (1.50%), Infosys Technologies (0.76%), and Maruti Suzuki India (0.70%).

The top losers included Larsen & Toubro (-5.17%), Tata Motors (-4.48%), Bharat Heavy Electricals (-3.95%), Mahindra & Mahindra (-3.87%), Reliance Communications (-2.78%) and HDFC Bank (-2.70%).