The stock market on Thursday recovered from early plunge but continued to remain in the red in afternoon trade.

The Bombay Stock Exchange benchmark Sensex was trading below 78 points at 71,422.79 as of 12:26 pm. The Nifty 50 index was a little above 25,000 points at noon.

Early in the day, the Sensex plunged by 400 points while Nifty had dropped below 21,500, this day after the stock market witnessed a bloodbath after initial highs. Sensex had tanked by 1,628 points while Nifty had nosedived by 460 points in the biggest slide in last 19 months.

“At elevated valuations the market needs only a trigger for a sell-off and yesterday this trigger came in the form of HDFC Bank’s worse-than-expected results. It is also important to understand that there was a sell-off in other emerging markets like Taiwan and Korea indicating that this is an emerging market correction driven by FPI (Foreign Portfolio Investors) outflows,” VK Vijayakumar, Chief Investment Strategist, Geojit Financial Services, told PTI.

Axis Bank, Sun Pharma, Kotak Bank, Bharti Airtel, and ICICI Bank were among the gainers. LTIMindtree, Power Grid, Divi’s Lab, Asian Paints, and ONGC were among the top losers during the opening session.

The stock market crash had took place days after a recent record-breaking rallywith the BSE benchmark hitting an all-time high of 73,427.59, and the Nifty also reached its lifetime peak of 22,124.15 the same day.