Morning Street View: Sensex Falls, Sell-Off Intensifies, IT Stocks Under Pressure

By Malvika Gurung

Investing.com -- Tracking negative cues from the beaten-down US indices and mixed signals from Asian stocks early in the day, the Indian equity market opened in red on Monday, seeing selling pressure intensifying as the Street awaits RBI’s monetary meet, taking centre stage in the week ahead. 

At the time of writing, benchmark indices Nifty 50 were trading 0.45% lower, and Sensex declined 329.5 points or 0.59%, with IT and realty sectors leading the sell-off, while PSU banks and FMCG counters dragged the market lower too.

With a better-than-expected US jobs report in May 2022, the US economy was indicated to remain strong despite concerns of a slowdown. However, the market viewed it in the context of the Fed Reserve continuing to march ahead with its aggressive policy-tightening, without bothering about a possible recession.

Most sectoral indices under the Nifty basket were trading in red, led by Nifty Media and Nifty IT , while the metal and pharmaceutical sectors were the only ones in green. Nifty Bank lowered 0.12%.

All the stocks under Nifty IT were down, led by Coforge (NS: COFO ) and Tech Mahindra (NS: TEML ).

"For India, elevated crude prices and a $23 billion trade deficit in May are areas of concern. Even though FPI selling has come down in early June they are likely to sell more at higher levels," stated V K Vijayakumar of Geojit Financial Services.

The fear barometer India VIX climbed nearly 2% at the time of writing, and almost 3/4th of stocks under the Nifty50 index were trading in the red.