Indian equities ended the week below 9,000 mark due to strong selling pressure witnessed across IT, consumer durable, oil & gas and metal stocks.

The 30-share index BSE Sensex, which opened with a loss of 25.06 points at 9,204.69, on Friday, rallied for a short time but profit booking at higher levels brought it back into the negative terrain.    

Among the sectoral indices, BSE Consumer durables and IT lost more than 4% each, Realty, Metal and Oil&gas declined over 3% each.   

BSE Midcap and Smallcap index lost 1.02% and 0.25% respectively.

Finally, the Sensex closed the day after losing 264.55 points at 8,965.20. It also touched an intra-day high of 9,340.69 and an intra-day low of 8,914.38 during the day.

The broad-based NSE Nifty lost 73.60 points at 2,714.40. It also hit an intra-day high of 2,821.15 and an intra-day low of 2,701.35 during the day.

The overall market breadth was negative as it saw 985 progressions as against 1,104 declinations.

The major gainers in the 30-share index included Tata Motors (1.46%), Grasim Industries (1.01%), Maruti Suzuki India (0.56%), Reliance Communications (0.15%), and ACC (0.04%).

On the other hand, Jaiprakash Associates (6.62%), Tata Consultancy Services (5.10%), Infosys Technologies (4.94%), DLF (4.87%), Housing Development Finance Corporation (4.84%), and Hindalco Industries (4.78%) were the major losers in the Sensex.

For the week ended Nov 22, India’s annual rate of inflation fell further to 8.4% as compared to 8.84% the week before on account of a sharp fall in petroleum fuels prices.

During the corresponding week of the last year (2007), the annual inflation rate was 3.11%.

The official wholesale price index (WPI) for all commodities dropped 0.6% to 233.7 during the week from 235.1 for the previous week.