Realty, power, banks, telecom drag Nifty below 5500

Equity benchmarks slipped quite sharply in the afternoon trade after a rangebound trade. The 50-share NSE Nifty dropped below the 5500 level for first time since March 24, dragged down by 47 shares out of 50.

Prabhat Awasthi of Nomura says that elevated inflation and interest rates, slowing growth momentum, risk to investment cycle and downside risk to corporate earnings growth amid rising overall input costs have underpinned cautious stance on the market since end of last year. He remains underweight on rate cyclicals, especially banks.

Realty, power, FMCG, banking, healthcare, cement, technology, telecom, and Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group companies' shares were taking huge beating - respective indices fell 1-2%.

However, Hero Honda showed complete outperformance as compared to other largecaps, with rising 5.5%. Analysts feel that company's fourth quarter EBITDA performance was better than street expectations. Even Reliance Industries and GAIL were other gainers.

The 30-share BSE Sensex was trading at 18,224, down 245 points and the 50-share NSE Nifty tumbled 81 points to 5,456.

But technical analyst, Rakesh Gandhi of LKP feels that Nifty has strong support at 5400 and Sensex at 18000.