The Sensex and Nifty ended the week on September 18 with a sixth straight weekly loss, the longest for the Sensex since 2020, even though the Nifty gained for a third straight session on Friday and the weekly fall was only 0.65 percent for the Sensex and 0.22 percent for the Nifty.
A losing streak sounds dramatic, but the size of the fall matters. Six weeks of declines that each amount to a fraction of a percent describe a market that is drifting rather than crashing.
The reasons cited are also slow-moving rather than sudden: crude above 100 dollars a barrel, West Asia tensions, steady foreign selling, higher US bond yields, and a Rs 22,569 crore IPO that soaked up liquidity.
It is a reminder that streaks are a counting convention, not a signal. A week that closes a hair lower breaks a run of gains as surely as one that falls sharply, and the count says nothing about the size of the moves.
For long-term investors, the more useful question is whether the drivers behind the drift are changing, and on that count, easing crude and a firmer Nifty on Friday were the only tentative positives.
Foreign institutional investor selling and elevated US bond yields were also cited among the pressures on the market.
A large NSE IPO worth about Rs 22,569 crore drew capital away from the secondary market during the week and constrained liquidity.
Technology stocks were among the laggards, and Tata Group shares including TCS and Titan fell sharply, with some of the declines running up to about 4 percent.
Banking, energy and life insurance stocks, including HDFC Life and SBI Life, were among the gainers.
The divergence between a falling Sensex and a rising Nifty on Friday reflected differences in the two indices’ constituents and bargain buying in some Nifty stocks.
Bombay Stock Exchange building, Mumbai (representative image), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0