Post Market Commentary - Nov 17 2008

A day after the Sensex slipped over 150 points on all-round selling, the market opened on a positive note shrugging off worries about recession. However, the market was gloomy amid a range-bound trend during intra-day trades influenced by subdued international markets. The Sensex saw strong optimism vanish after adding 51 points to touch the day's high of 9,436. The market zigzagged between its positives and negatives thereafter, but eased in the afternoon on sustained selling in realty, banking and consumer durable stocks to touch the intra-day low below 9,000 at 8,957. Heavy buying in most of the index pivotal stocks helped the Sensex trim most of the losses towards the close and end the session at 9,291, down 94 points. Nifty closed with a loss of 11 points at 2,800.

However, the market breadth was heavily tilted in favour of losers as 1,796 stocks declined, 682 stocks advanced and 61 stocks remained unchanged on the BSE. Most of sectoral indices closed with losses. BSE Realty, BSE Bankex, BSE CD and BSE Metal were the major losers and slipped over 3-5% each. However, BSE Teck soared 0.49% followed by BSE IT (up 0.02%).

Among the 30 Sensex stocks, 10 ended in the green. Attracting strong buying support Wipro surged by 4.59% at Rs251.95, ACC shot up by 4.29% at Rs436.55, Tata Motors jumped by 2.56% at Rs140.45, Maruti Suzuki advanced by 2.45% at Rs549.80, Bharti Airtel scaled up by 2.29% at Rs665.05, NTPC zoomed 1.24% at Rs151.10 and Infosys Technologies added 1.22% at Rs1,232.80. Among the laggards, HDFC Bank tumbled 7.71% at Rs933.60, Reliance Infrastructure slipped 6.23% at Rs484.40, Tata Steel fell 4.01% at Rs166.30, DLF was down 3.92% at Rs231.45 and HDFC lost 3.84% at Rs1,498.30.

Over 1.96 crore GVK Power & Infrastructure shares changed hands on BSE followed by Suzlon Energy (1.47 crore shares), Unitech (1.40 crore shares), Chambal chemicals & fertilisers (0.69 crore shares) and Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd (0.64 crore shares)