Indian shares fell 0.3 percent on Friday to log its first weekly loss in six weeks, with investors locking in profits ahead of quarterly earnings, after rallying to a 33-month high earlier this week. Analysts said the market was showing signs of fatigue and sentiment has turned cautious.
"Our view is this is a traders' market. There has been profit booking by long-only foreign funds, given that there are fears over controls on foreign inflows," said Ambareesh Baliga, senior vice president at Karvy Stock Broking. Foreign institutional investors have pumped in a record $21.3 billion into Indian equities so far this year, sending the benchmark index up 16 percent. Nearly a third of this money has come in since the start of September. The 30-share BSE index closed 0.32 percent, or 65.06 points lower at 20,250.26, on Friday, with 20 of its components declining. It had risen as much as 0.5 percent in early trade.
The benchmark, which had hit a 33-month-high on Monday, is still about 950 points away from a record high of 21,206.77 scaled in January 2008. However, larger rival Tata Consultancy shed 0.9 percent. Larsen & Toubro Ltd ended 0.2 percent higher, after rising 1.2 percent at one point, after the engineering conglomerate secured orders worth 15.85 billion rupees ($358 million). In the broader market, gainers led losers in the ratio of 1.7-to-1 on a heavy volume of 630 million shares. The 50-share NSE index was down 0.3 percent at 6,103.45 points.
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