The bears didn’t let up in the afternoon, digging their claws in further and undoing more of the bulls' recent good work. There is no other way to express it, it was a rout from pillar to post.

Every sector closed in the red with energy and materials plays by far the worst in show, their respective sectors were down 4.5% and 3.4% respectively.

There were some hard hit stocks on the day, with Aquarius Platinum (-11%) and Aquila Resources (-10.3%) having sessions they would much rather forget.

The big four banks were not spared from the carnage, with NAB (-3.7%) and CBA (-3.1%) the worst of the group. Commodity price weakness did not help the mining majors, with BHP and Rio Tinto dropping 3.8% and 3% respectively.

Iluka Resources declined 1.5% after reporting that its FY12 net profit fell 33% over the year to $363.2 million. At the other end of the spectrum, Seek enjoyed a 4.7% gains whilst Qantas was flying high, adding 2.8%.

All-in-all it was a stinker however, with the ASX 200 suffering through a 119 point (-2.3%) decline to settle at 4980.

Evening Market Update: Dog Day Afternoon is a post from: Australian Stock Report Market Pulse Blog