The Sensex closed 555.23 points lower at 75,577.58 on Tuesday, its second straight day of losses, while the Nifty50 fell 144.05 points to 23,635.10.

What’s more interesting than the headline number is the divergence underneath it: the Nifty MidCap rose 0.21 percent and the Nifty SmallCap rose 0.17 percent on the same day the large-cap benchmarks fell.

That split suggests the sell-off is concentrated in specific large-cap sectors — banking names like SBI Life Insurance Company, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank were the biggest drags — rather than reflecting broad-based risk-off sentiment across the market.

For founders and operators tracking market sentiment as a signal for fundraising conditions or consumer spending, a large-cap-specific pullback driven by oil prices and Gulf tensions reads very differently than a broad-based correction — the latter would show up in mid-caps and small-caps too, and it hasn’t.

The takeaway is that headline index moves can mask more than they reveal; two consecutive days of ‘markets fall’ headlines were, underneath, a large-cap and banking-specific story, with the rest of the market holding up.

Foreign institutional investor selling has been a recurring theme in recent sessions, adding to the pressure from oil prices and geopolitical uncertainty.

Analysts have flagged continued volatility as long as Gulf tensions and crude oil supply concerns remain unresolved, with markets likely to stay reactive to fresh developments.

Deepa Jewellers was among the new listings debuting on the exchanges around the same period, drawing separate investor attention even as the benchmark indices declined.

Tuesday marked the second straight session of losses for the Sensex, following Monday’s 382-point decline that was also attributed to crude oil prices and Gulf tensions.

SBI Life Insurance Company, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank were among the top losers on the Nifty50 index during Tuesday’s session.

The broader markets showed a different pattern than the benchmark indices, with the Nifty MidCap rising 0.21 percent and the Nifty SmallCap rising 0.17 percent even as the Sensex and Nifty fell.

National Stock Exchange building, Mumbai, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0