Sensex ends 95 points down on profit booking; TCS up 5.5%

Profit booking stepped in on Friday after a rally of 119 points on previous day - the benchmark Nifty closed below the 6100 level. The sell-off in metal, FMCG, capital goods, realty, auto and select private financial companies' shares along with Wipro, ONGC and Bharti weighed on the markets in second half of trade.

However, the support was led by TCS, Siemens, Infosys, SBI, Ranbaxy Labs, PNB, ACC, Reliance Communications, ICICI Bank and Sun Pharma, which capped losses to major extent. Reliance Industries was also quite supportive though it ended flat.

Anantha Narayan, co-head equities at ICICI Securities said near-term would be determined by flows and right now the flows do seem positive. FIIs were consistently net buyers to the tune of more than Rs 84,000 crore since June 2010.

"The immediate future is clearly been driven by flows. The fundamentals are solid but there have been no big surprises as far as earnings are concerned. Valuations are not really cheap but you could argue that they are not in bubble zone either, so they are neither here nor there. The driver has been flows. Those flows could likely continue and we are seeing this sort of money that Coal India attracted and despite that we still saw net FII inflows for those 3-4 days when the issue was open. That would be the determinant of the near-term movement for the market," he explained.

The 30-share BSE Sensex closed at 20,165.86, down 94.72 points or 0.47% and the 50-share NSE Nifty fell 35.45 points or 0.58% to settle at 6,066.05.

Even the Nifty October futures' premium trimmed down to 20 points from 33 points and the Nifty November futures ended at 46 points premium, as per provisional data. For the week, equity benchmarks ended flat with a positive bias.