Sensex drops 208 pts at close; slips below 25,000-mark intra-day

Nervousness once again gripped the equity markets on the last trading session of the week after snapping a six-session fall on Thursday, with the benchmark Sensex briefly slipping below the crucial 25,000-mark in the last hour of the trade on hectic selling pressure.[caption id="attachment_2542204" align="alignleft" width="380"] Reuters[/caption]Besides the weak global stock market sentiment, frustration among the local investors also started creeping in over the stuck GST Bill in the parliamentary gridlock, leading to further erosion in stock value due to heavy investor selling.Widespread selling in banking, automobile, capital goods, realty and power stocks resulted in the Sensex slipping to the day's low of 24,930.43, down 322 points. Although, some losses were erased, the 30-share BSE S&P Sensex closed the session at 25,044.43, down 207.89 points, or 0.3 percent from previous close.The broader 50-stock CNX Nifty ended the session at 7,610.45, down 72.85 points, or nearly 1 percent lower.Market breadth ended weak, with 1,667 stocks declining against 991 advances on BSE.Falling for the second successive week, the benchmark Sensex lost 2.3 percent or 594 points in the current week.Among other Asian market peers, China's Hang Seng tumbled 1.1 percent while Shanghai Composite fell 0.6 percent even as Japan's Nikkei rebounded today to end nearly 1 percent higher. All the three European equity gauges were down around 0.5 percent each in mid-day trades.Foreign institutional investors continued to retreat from the domestic equities, offloading shares to the tune of Rs 1,517 crore in the first four sessions of the week, while selling Rs 11,671 crore over the past one month, a move seen as a strategy to exit from emerging markets ahead of the impending US Fed rate hike this month.