Indices trade choppy on profit booking; Financial stocks drag

Equity benchmark indices turned choppy on Wednesday, as investors took profit at higher levels amid concerns about a trade conflict between the United States and China. Also, investors await today's US Federal Reserve's June monetary policy meeting minutes.

In the last four trading sessions, the Nifty rose nearly 4% over the previous six sessions and hit record highs in each session.

The BSE Sensex was trading 5.97 points or 0.01% higher at 65,485.02 while Nifty50 was up by 5 points at 19,394.

High weightage financials lost over 0.6%, dragged by HDFC and HDFC Bank, down more than 2.5% each.

Broader indexes outperformed their larger peers, with smallcaps and midcaps gaining 0.6% and 0.4% to hover around 52-week and record highs, respectively.

ITC was among the top Nifty gainers, followed by Divi's Labs, HDFC Life, Hero MotoCorp and IndusInd Bank. On the flip side, HDFC and HDFC Bank were among the top Nifty losers on account of profit booking. Tata Consumer Products, Eicher Motors, and Apollo Hospital were among the losers.

The overall market breadth was positive as 2,001 shares were advancing while 1,138 were declining on the BSE.

Meanwhile, Asian markets decline after a slowdown in China's services activity dented sentiment and as markets turned their focus to the release of Federal Reserve minutes and a key US jobs report later in the week.

Source: Media reports