MUMBAI : The market has opened on a strong note with the Nifty rushing towards 8700. The 50-share index is up 16.00 points or 0.2 percent at 8654.50. The Sensex is up 71.05 points or 0.3 percent at 28122.91. About 448 shares have advanced, 113 shares declined, and 45 shares are unchanged.Hero MotoCorp is up 6 percent, Bharti Airtel, BHEL, Tata Steel and ONGC are top gainers. ICICI Bank is down 2 percent.

The Indian rupee gained in the early trade . It opened higher by 22 paise at 66.80 per dollar versus 67.02 Friday. The yen fell following a 3.1 percent surge on Friday as the Bank of Japan boosted purchases of exchange-traded funds.

It could be mixed bag for auto sector in July. Passenger car companies like Maruti may see growth slow down to single digits. However, two-wheeler companies like Hero Moto and TVS Motor may see more than 10 percent growth.

Advanced enzymes will make its stock market debut today. The issue oversubscribed nearly 116 times and expect a very strong listing today.

Sanjeev Prasad of Kotak Securities says the current bull market is a ‘weird’ one, in which fundamentals don’t matter at all.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Prasad says the rally is being fuelled by massive inflows into exchange traded funds and that actively traded funds are not getting any meaningful money.

He says broadly the quarterly earnings have been far from impressive. While some key companies have reported strong bottomline growth, in many cases the rise has been driven by change in accounting rules, other income and such one-off factors.

Prasad says the topline growth for most companies have been quite weak.

Among global peers, Asian shares ticked up slightly after disappointing US economic growth data reduced expectations of a rate hike by the US Federal Reserve in the next few months. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan. Japan’s Nikkei 1.5 percent as the yen had soared after the Bank of Japan’s stimulus plans underwhelmed investors.

US gross domestic product increased at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the April-June period, less than a half of a 2.6 percent growth rate economists had expected.
Markets took the data to mean the Federal Reserve was nowhere near policy tightening, even after it had appeared last week to have opened the door to a rate hike later this year by saying near-term risks to the economy had diminished.