At 14.19 hrs IST, the markets were witnessing choppy trade with negative bias. Buying interest was seen in FMCG, realty, and telecom stocks while banks, auto, capital goods and metal stocks were witnessing selling pressure.

Stocks like ITC, Bharti Airtel, HDFC Bank, ONGC and BHEL were positive contributors to the Sensex. However, Reliance, Infosys, L&T, ICICI Bank and HDFC were the major draggers.
The Sensex was down 67.80 points or 0.62% at 10911.70, and the Nifty was down 5.60 points or 0.17% at 3371.50, at 14:19 hours IST.

The market breadth was negative, about 1434 shares advanced, 1524 shares declined, and 139 shares were unchanged.

Nandan Chakraborty, Head of Research at Enam Securities, feels that the market may neither surge, nor collapse post elections. He advises selling into the rally due to political uncertainty and global liquidity. However, Chakraborty does not think that a new bull market has begun. The current rally, according to him, is driven by deployment of excess cash. He further opines that investors should wait for elections to get over to deploy further money.

The top gainers on the Sensex were Bharti Airtel at Rs 726.95 up 5.54%, DLF at Rs 240.50 up 4.20%, Sun Pharma at Rs 1,225 up 3.59%, ITC at Rs 189.90 up 3.09% and Hindalco at Rs 54.75 up 2.24%.

However, the top losers on the Sensex were Tata Motors at Rs 233.50 down 5.12%, Tata Steel at Rs 250.70 down 4.62% and ICICI Bank at Rs 409.80 down 3.93%, Sterlite Ind at Rs 388 down 2.83% and Reliance Infra at Rs 678.10 down 2.71%.