Pre Market Watch - Feb 20 2008

The Indian Market is likely to have a negative opening due to unfavoring cues from the global markets. On Tuesday, the market closed with marginal gains after a strong start to the session. Taking the strong cues from the Asian markets, the domestic market opened with a bang and created a rally across the sectoral indices scrips. The market tumbled after the mid session to pare all its initial gains as the profit booking across the sectoral indices prevailed and finally managed to close with little gains. The Small Cap and Mid Cap scrips seemed to attract the investor''s confidence as most buying was seen from these baskets. The BSE Sensex closed higher by 27.61 points at 18,075.66 and NSE Nifty closed up by 3.9 points at 5,280.80. We expect that the market may remain range bound during the trading session.

On Tuesday, the US market was closed in negative. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed lower by 10.99 points at 12,337.22. S&P 500 index fell by 1.21 points to close at 1,348.78 and NASDAQ dropped by 15.60 points to close at 2,306.20.

Indian ADRs closed mixed. In technology sector, Satyam grew by (0.42%) while Wipro fell by (0.35%) along with Infosys by (0.29%). In banking sector, HDFC bank and ICICI bank fell by (1.31%) and (1.04%) respectively.

Today, the major stock markets in Asia are trading weak. Japan''s Nikkei is trading lower by 106.27 points at 13,651.64 along with Hang Seng trading down by 95.26 points at 24,027.91 and Taiwan Weighted trading at 8,000.74 down by 23.67 points.

The FIIs on Tuesday stood as net seller in equity while buyer in debt. The gross equity purchased was Rs1,766.90 Crore and the gross debt purchased was Rs106.90 Crore while the gross equity sold stood at Rs21,882.80 Crore and gross debt sold stood at Rs0.00 Crore. Therefore, the net investment of equity reported was (Rs115.90 Crore) and net debt was Rs106.90 Crore.

Today, Nifty has support at 5,198 and resistance at 5,336 and BSE Sensex has support at 17,753 and resistance at 18,369.