Pre Market Watch - Apr 3 2008

The Indian Market is likely to have a positive opening today as the Asian market is trading higher. On Wednesday, The Indian market closed marginally higher after giving up most of its early gains despite 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 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. We expect that the market may remain volatile during the trading session.

On Wednesday, the US market closed in negative territory. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed lower by 48.53 points at 12,605.83 along with S&P 500 (SPX) index fell by 2.65 points to close at 1,367.53 and NASDAQ Composite (RIXF) dropped by 1.35 points to close at 2,361.40.

The Indian ADRs closed in negative. In technology sector, Satyam fell by (3.56%) along with Infosys by (0.69%) while Wipro grew by (1.48%). In banking sector, ICICI bank and HDFC bank dropped by (4.20%) and (3.53%) respectively. In telecommunication sector, Tata Communications and MTNL slipped by (4.13%) and (1.35%) respectively. Sterlite industries decreased by (4.23%).

Today the major stock markets in Asia are trading firm. Hang Seng is trading higher by 147.33 points at 24,019.76 along with Singapore Strait Times trading up by 13.31 points at 3,137.92 and Japan’s Nikkei trading at 13,200.71 up by 11.35 points.

The FIIs on Wednesday stood as net seller in equity. The gross equity purchased was Rs2,661.40 Crore and the gross debt purchased was Rs0.00 Crore while the gross equity sold stood at Rs3,849.60 Crore and gross debt sold stood at Rs0.00 Crore. Therefore, the net investment of equity reported was (Rs1,188.20 Crore) and net debt was Rs0.00 Crore.

The country''s exports registered a 35% growth in February 2008 with the cumulative export growth during the first 11 months of just-ended fiscal 2007-08 showing a robust growth close to 23% in dollar terms, against heavy odds the exporters confronted throughout the year due to the unrelenting increase in the value of rupee. Provisional trade data released by the Directorate-General of Commercial Intelligence & Statistics (DGCI&S) show that the country''s exports during February 2008 were estimated at $14.2 billion, against $10.5 billion in the corresponding month of 2007. At best, exporters say that the final month export figure could at best be $14-15 billion which itself would be a tall order. Interestingly, while the export growth in rupee terms during February 2008 was 21.7 per cent, cumulative export growth during the first 11 months of the fiscal 2007-08 was in single digit at close to 9%.

Today, Nifty has support at 4,623 and resistance at 4,819 and BSE Sensex has support at 15,314 and resistance at 15,993.