The Sensex, tracking the Wall Street decline and the Asian market blues, opened with a huge negative gap of 425 points at 14,675. And immediately dropped to a low of 14,571 in morning deals - a massive drop of 529 points from the previous close.

Buying at lower levels, specially in tech scrips and heavyweights like Reliance, saw the index marginally shrug-off the US subprime woes and close with a loss of 232 points (1.5%) at 14,868.

The BSE Bankex, Metal and Realty indices dropped over 2% each to 7774, 10,864 and 7263, respectively. The BSE IT index bucked the trend, and was up nearly 1% at 4774.

The market breadth was marginally negative at close after being extremely bearish in morning trades. Out of 2,660 scrips traded today, 1,591 declined and 1,023 logged gains.

Index losers...

Bharti dropped 3.5% to Rs 839. Reliance Communications [Get Quote] slipped nearly 3% to Rs 521.

HDFC [Get Quote] declined over 3% to Rs 1,947. Hindalco [Get Quote] also slipped 3% to Rs 151.

ICICI Bank [Get Quote] and SBI [Get Quote] were down over 2% each at Rs 866 and Rs 1,607, respectively. NTPC, ONGC [Get Quote], HUL and Tata Steel [Get Quote] also slipped over 2% each today.

Reliance closed with a loss of 1.7% (Rs 31) at Rs 1,811.

...and gainers

Satyam [Get Quote] gained over 2.6% to close at Rs 479. Infosys [Get Quote] added nearly 1% at Rs 1,952.

Bajaj moved up over 1% to Rs 2,319, and Tata Motors [Get Quote] was up 1% at Rs 669.

Most active counters

Orbit Corporation [Get Quote] was the most active counter with a turnover of Rs 317 crore followed by IFCI (Rs 232 crore), DLF (Rs 171 crore), Reliance (Rs 165 crore) and Omaxe (Rs 138 crore).