As expected, the markets opened on a negative note, and continued the same trend throughout the day, except at one point the markets recovered all the losses, taking cue from the strong opening of the European markets and support from the banking shares, but the gains were short-lived and the markets pared all the gains,with both the Nifty and Sensex closing down by loosing, 17 and 44 points respectively.  The only performers of the day were Kotak Bank and Sun Pharma.The market breadth was negative, with 568 advances to 902 declines. The lack of institutional activity was again visible, with FIIs & DIIs turning net sellers, merely to the tune of  446 and 82 crores respectively in the cash market. On the derivatives side, the FIIs sold Index futures worth 311 crores and brought stock futures worth 144 crores. Nifty futures ended at 5251, with 25 points premium to the spot and minuscule loss of open interest. On the options side PCR increased to 1.01. On the Call option side, the 5200 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5400 & 5300 calls, while on the Put option side, the 5100 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5000 & 5200 puts. The India VIX was marginally up by 1.68%. Today's activity in the F&O space suggests, call writing at higher levels and at the same time addition of puts is adding pressure to the weak markets. On the technical side, all the indicators are in sell mode and the levels to watch out for Nifty will be 5256, 5283 & 5300 on the upside, and 5189, 5153 & 5144 on the downside. A short term bounce-back cannot be ruled out based on trends from international market, but the overall market trend still remains down and every rise will be used as a selling opportunity.

The U.S. markets are trading in the green on the back of good economic and corporate data and the European markets have managed to close in the green for the day.