Sunday, Feb 1, was indeed a rare day for markets to open. And even rarer for it to crash. That, too, more than 2200 points on the Sensex and 700 points on the Nifty at its worst moment! Both indices recovered in the afternoon, only to close 1.9 per cent lower intraday.
At market close, Sensex settled at 80,722.94, down 1.88 per cent; and Nifty settled at 24,825.45, down 1.96 per cent.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman began to present the Union Budget at 11 am in Parliament. By 12.30 pm, benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty slumped by over 2 per cent in a selling rout that shaved off all the gains from the past nine months.
Sensex and Nifty saw choppy trade ahead of the Budget presentation after fluctuating in a narrow range in morning trade. By noon, the Indian bourses were on freefall. The Sensex and Nifty opened higher, but quickly dropped.
In morning trade, Sun Pharma emerged as a major gainer in the 30-pack Sensex after it spiked 3 per cent on Q3 results. By the end of the trading day, it was the third-highest-gaining stock, just 1 per cent up, followed by Titan. The only two above them were TCS and Infosys.
The rest was a bloodbath. The biggest losers on the Sensex were SBI (down 5.61 per cent), Adani Ports (down 5.53 per cent), and Bharat Electronics (down 5.36 per cent).
By market close, 26 of the 30 Sensex constituents and 43 of the 50 Nifty constituents were in the red.
One of the major market proposals by Sitharaman was to hike the securities transaction tax on derivatives trading. This meant that the impact cost for market hedgers and traders was likely to increase, with a hike in STT on futures and options.
A dip in STT on derivatives also means that there could be a liquidity crunch in capital markets. There were also no marked announcements to arrest the foreign fund outflows that have been marring the stock markets for the past year.
Another point of concern was the lower-than-expected capex of Rs 12.22 lakh crore announced for FY2026-27. Despite it being 10 per cent higher than the Rs 11.11 lakh crore budgeted capex announced in FY2025-26, the streets were less than impressed.
