Market rallies on banking and consumer durable stocks

The Sensex had a roaring start and the index continued its record rally after Friday's recovery. Strong economic numbers including the July new home sales and durable goods’ orders sent the US markets higher on Friday. Tracking the same, Asian markets rose over 1% in early trades and the Sensex too resumed with a positive gap of 156 points at 14,581. Ease in the domestic political worries also helped the Sensex to rally. The market gained momentum by mid-morning trades on gains in banking, realty and consumer durable stocks and rallied sharply to touch the day's high of 14,859. The index also received major support from ICICI Bank, SBI and Reliance Communication, which gained over 5-6% today. Finally, the Sensex closed the session at 14,842, up 418 points. The Nifty ended the session at 4,303 up 112 points.

Among the sectoral indices the BSE Realty index led the upsurge with gains of 5.37% at 7,147 followed by the BSE Bankex index (up 4.64% at 7,655), the BSE CD index (up 4.48% at 4,165) and the BSE CG (up 3.63% at 13,018). The market breadth was extremely positive. Of the 2,718 stocks traded on the BSE 2,067 stocks advanced, 605 stocks declined and 46 stocks ended unchanged.

Out of the 30 Sensex stocks, 28 managed to end in the green while two stocks ended with losses. SBI was the leading gainer and soared 6.17% at Rs1,557. ICICI Bank jumped 5.93% at Rs884, Maruti Udyog shot up by 5.13% at Rs831, Hindalco advanced 4.54% at Rs148, Reliance Communication moved up by 4.45% at Rs521, L&T added 3.75% at Rs2,536 and BHEL gained 3.72% at Rs1,816. Among the laggards, Ambuja Cement dropped 1.62% at Rs133 and Cipla slipped marginally at Rs170.

Over 1.45 crore Tata Tele Services shares changed hands on the BSE followed by SEL Manufacturing (1.34 crore shares), IFCI (76.64 lakh shares), UCO Bank (64.79 lakh shares) and IQMS Software (61.33 lakh shares).

Take Solutions registered a turnover of Rs505 crore on the BSE followed by SEL Manufacturing (Rs295 crore), Reliance Industries (Rs120 crore), SBI (Rs111 crore) and ICICI Bank (Rs105 crore).