Rout in Adani group shares, banks drag Sensex 874 points, Nifty ends at 17,600
Equity markets buckled under severe selling pressure to close at 3-month lows on Friday driven by an extended slump in Adani group stocks that soured overall market sentiment.
Banking stocks were the top laggards as claims of high debt of Adani firms made by Hindenburg in its recent report had a sentimentally negative impact on the banking space, especially PSU banks, analysts said.
The BSE Sensex cracked 874 points to close at 59,331, its lowest level since Oct 21, 2022 when it ended at 59,307. The NSE Nifty dropped to 17,604 with a massive loss of 288 points.
Adani Enterprises and Adani Ports were the leading Nifty losers, which ended 18 and 15 per cent lower, respectively. SBI, ICICI Bank, IndusInd Bank were next in line dropping up to 5 per cent.
Shares of other Adani firms–Adani Wilmar, Adani Transmission, Adani Green, Adani Total Gas, Adani Power, Ambuja Cement and ACC– closed with losses of 5-20 per cent on top of Wednesday’s decline, which came as short-seller Hindenburg Research said it held short positions in Adani Group companies through US-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivative instruments and accused the group of stock manipulation and accounting fraud.
Four Adani group stocks listed in the F&O (Futures & Options) segment – Adani Enterprises, Adani Ports, ACC and Ambuja Cement witnessed a build-up of Open Interest (OI) on the short-side since the beginning of this week, which is a couple of days prior to the release of Hindenburg report.
As per Reuters, SEBI has increased scrutiny of deals by the Adani Group over the past year and will also study the report issued by Hindenburg Research to add to its own ongoing preliminary investigation into the group’s foreign portfolio investors. Read more
Shares of Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto and Dr Reddy’s firmly resisted Friday’s market crash on strong Q3 earnings. Besides, auto, pharma, FMCG indices were the only outperformers in a broad-based selloff, while the Nifty PSB and oil & gas indices were the worst hit with cuts of 5 per cent each.