India : Sensex up 456 pts, Nifty posts biggest 1-day gain in last 6 mths
Spectacular rally on Friday helped equity benchmarks turned positive for the week as well as for the calendar year. On the first day of December series, the NSE Nifty closed above 8100 level and posted the biggest one-day gain in last six months, driven by in technology, HDFC Group and FMCG stocks.Value buying after more than 7 percent loss in November due to demonetisation & US elections and sharp recovery in rupee could be the reason for positive sentiment.
The 30-share BSE Sensex surged 456.17 points or 1.76 percent to 26316.34 and the 50-share NSE Nifty jumped 148.80 points or 1.87 percent to 8114.30. The broader markets also participated in the rally as the BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices gained 1.3 percent and 2 percent, respectively.
Dipen Shah of Kotak Securities says going ahead, the central bank meetings in India / US and the Italian referendum will be important triggers to watch out for.
Apart from this, markets will also try to gauge the medium term impact of the demonetisation scheme of the government, he feels.
The recent fall in markets has made led to sizeable losses in prices of several stock. Hence, Shah says one must identify fundamentally sound stocks and accumulate them with a long term perspective.
Vinod Nair of Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services says now the market will focus over the possibility of a 50 basis points cut in repo rate by RBI in the next monetary policy.
The market breadth was quite strong as more than three shares advanced for every share falling on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
For the week, the Sensex gained 0.6 percent and the Nifty rose 0.5 percent.
Meanwhile, the rupee recovered sharply against the American currency in sustained bouts of dollar selling from banks and exporters amid rally in equities. It was trading at 68.45, up 27 paise from previous settlement, at the time of writing this article.
All sectoral indices closed in the green today. IT & Pharma gained the most, up 4.75 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
Infosys, which had seen delivery buying worth Rs 700 crore on Thursday, was up 4.8 percent. TCS and Tech Mahindra surged 5-6 percent. Wipro was up 3 percent.
Sun Pharma climbed 4 percent. Bank of America Merrill Lynch has a buy call on the stock with a target price of Rs 790 as it says seven observations for Mohali unit don’t seem incriminating and these are minor in nature but Halol plant inspection outcome will be more critical.
HDFC, HDFC Bank, ITC, Lupin, NTPC, Dr Reddy’s Labs and GAIL surged 2-3.5 percent whereas Bajaj Auto, SBI and Bharti Airtel were the only losers among Sensex 30 stocks, down 0.2-0.7 percent.
In the broader space, Bata India gained 2 percent and Shilpa Medicare surged 9 percent after quarterly earnings. J Kumar Infra was up 9.6 percent on metro orders worth Rs 1,794 crore.
Fortune Financial spiked 4.7 percent on acquisition of additional 16.4 crore shares for Rs 164 crore in ITI Reinsurance. Talwalkars gained 5 percent on demerger of gym business into Talkwalkars Lifestyle.
