Post Market Commentary - Apr 2 2008

The Indian market gave up most of its early gains after a strong start to the trading session. The market opened on a firm note tracking the strong favoring cues from the global markets and all of a sudden kept on drifting down further from there on as the profit booking prevailed. However, the strong global cues like Lehman Brothers raising of $4billion in an offering of convertible preferred shares eased fears of heading for a fate similar to that of Bear Stearns, fell to kept the market at the higher levels and gave up most of its gains. The Sensex spurts more than 600 points at the initial stage to touch an intraday high of 16,236.70 and low of 15,719.47. The investors took calculated steps to book their positions.

The BSE Sensex closed higher by 123.78 points at 15,750.40 and NSE Nifty closed up by 14.65 points at 4,754.20. The BSE Mid Caps and Small Caps closed up by 17.87 points and 50.38 points at 6,412.97 and 7,912.14 respectively.

The market breadth was strong as 1764 stocks closed in green as against 909 stocks that closed in red.

The Metal index dropped by 296.87 points to close at 13,516.89. Major losers are JSW Steel (4.40%), SAIL (3.90%), Ispat Inds (3.28%), Tata Steel (3.21%), Sterlite inds (2.15%), Nalco (2.14%), Sesa Goa (2.14%) and Jindal Steel (1.93%).

The Bankex index grew by 179.01 points to close at 7,822.56. Major gainers are BOI (6.60%), Canara bank (5.62%), ICICI bank (3.65%), Axis bank (3.04%), IOB (2.54%), SBI (1.73%) and CentBOP (1.75%).

The IT index closed higher by 103.76 points at 3,644.35 as Mosear Baer (4.42%), Infosys (4.26%), Rolta India (4.03%), Satyam (2.48%), Finance Technologies (2.34%), TCS (1.92%) and Wipro (1.32%) closed in green.

The Oil and Gas index closed lower by 25.64 points at 10,328.08. Losers are Cairn India (3.02%), BPCL (1.83%), Aban Offshore (1.73%), Essar Oil (1.73%), RNRL (1.58%) and RPL (1.14%).

From the FMCG space, Galxosmithkline Cons (2.99%), Marico (1.89%), Dabur (1.59%), ITC (1.44%) and HUL (1.15%) closed in red.

The Capital Goods index fell by 61.78 points to close at 13,498.15 as Thermax (1.99%), Elecon Eng (1.34%), Havell India (1.24%), Bharat Electronics (1.04%), L&T (1.01%) and ABB (0.39%) closed in negative.

The BSE Realty index closed up by 34.69 points at 7,501.17 as Akruti City (19.60%), Purvankara (5.06%), Indbul Real (3.17%), HDIL (2.07%), Anant Raj (2.06%) closed in green.