Mumbai, May 19: Darlings yesterday, dumped today. The heavyweight shares were the heroes of the dream run on the bourses in the past few months that saw the sensex top the 12000-mark.

However, on a bad day, no one is spared and even favourites become the first ones to be dumped.

After shattering the hopes of its loyal investors on Thursday in the biggest-ever fall in BSE’s 150-year history, the sensex did not provide a respite today and ended the day with a loss of 452 points.

The culprit today was Thursday’s huge 826 points drop, which made marketmen jittery as fears of a payment crisis loomed large and margin calls were hit.

Margin calls are triggered by leveraged positions and with respect to margin funding. If investors are unable to cough up additional margins, banks or stock exchanges undertake forced selling.

And since banks and brokerage houses provide huge margin funding for the heavyweight scrips, they are the first ones to get offloaded at whatever price they fetch.

To add fuel to the fire, these stocks had huge open positions in the F& segment and thus bore the brunt in the cash segment as investors fell over another to square off their positions.

In the continuing bull run, investors were expecting the share prices to increase further and had entered into future contracts to buy the stocks at a stipulated price at a later date.

However, when the market started falling, in an effort to minimise their losses, investors started selling off their shares in the cash market to square off their positions.

“Every fall is usually followed by a bounce back as there are investors who anticipate a fall and, therefore, go short on stocks, which means selling the stocks before buying them. Therefore, when the market tanks, they start buying, which again pushes up the market,” explained an analyst.

“However, yesterday’s fall was so unprecedented that there were not enough short positions in the market, which would require covering up and, therefore, induce buying,” he added.

The market has been hit by sustained FII selling in the past few days. According to Sebi data, FIIs sold shares worth Rs 810.60 crore yesterday. In the five trading sessions between May 11 and May 17, they have sold shares worth Rs 2,865.80 crore.

Domestic mutual funds have offered some solace to the falling market and purchased stocks to the tune of Rs 762.18 crore. This was their second highest buy for the month this far. Mutual funds had bought a significant Rs 785.36 crore worth of shares on May 15, the day the markets tanked by more than 500 points during intra-day session.