Bears were not ready to give up control easily to the bulls and have tightened their grip since the previous week after the 5400 level broke on the Nifty. Indian equities were wrecked again today in the last one hour of trade to close a tad above the 5250 level. The benchmark broke the 5300 level, which managed to hold in yesterday's trade, and in opening trade today. All sectoral indices shut shop in the red.

Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) companies, infrastructure, metal and public sector companies' shares took a huge beating on the exchanges. Midcap and smallcap stocks too were slaughtered - more than the benchmarks.
It is a clear lack of confidence, says Jitendra Sriram of HSBC AMC, which he ascribes to the scams and all the other issues that have been coming forth. "Especially a lot of correction that we are seeing in the last couple of days has got to do with promoter pledge shares and so on. So, that is something which is probably leading the next leg down in the sense that people are seeing where all the weakness lies," he said.

The 30-share BSE Sensex closed 17,592.77, down 182.93 points or 1.03% and the 50-share NSE Nifty fell 59 points or 1.11%, to settle at 5,253.55. The BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices fell 4%.

According to independent market analyst, Ved Prakash Chaturvedi, the macro headwinds like higher global commodity prices, high expected inflation in emerging markets, tightening and added to that policy execution and commercial lending etc will come under pressure, are all causing concern. "I guess 2011 will go down as a year when we had macro headwinds but the micro story in some cases remained robust," he said.