Worst fall in Indian trading history

By Varinder Bansal, CNBC-TV18 | 21 Jan 2008

CNBCIt was a highly dramatic and scary day for markets as they saw their biggest ever fall, making it the worst day in the trading history of the two exchanges as the pace of the fall was unnerving.

Sensex was down by nearly 1,400 points day at one point of time, perhaps, triggered by recession concerns coming from the US. There was also margin call pressure and technical pressure on the markets today.

If we go back in history, on 18 May 2006 we saw the second highest fall which was about 826 points or nearly a 6.5 per cent fall in the Sensex and the concerns at that point of time was because of a government circular on taxing investment gains and also heavy selling by the FIIs, retailers and also the local brokers, and also there was weakness in the global markets.

The third highest fall was noticed on 28th April 1992, when the Harshad Mehta scam broke out, when the Sensex nose-dived to 570 points which was around 13% because the base was very low.

The fourth highest was around 17th May 2004, we saw a Black Monday when the Sensex nose-dived at around 565 points on account of NDA loosing elections to the UPA.

But today's fall has been the worst, which one could ever see in the Indian markets because not only did we touch a 10 per cent decline were also very close to it tumbling 15 per cent, which was seen only once in the history of entire Indian stock market.