Lethargy continues

Today's major news

HCC bags Rs317.92-crore road project; the stock rises 2.52%.

Pratibha Industries secures contract worth Rs130 crore; the stock surges 2.09%.

KEC International wins orders worth Rs550 crore; the stock jumps 3.24%.

Patel Engineering bags $1 billion order in Djibouti; the stock ends the day 2.22% higher.

Tanla Solutions arm commences operations from SEZ in Hyderabad; the stock shot up 6.09%.

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Post-market summary

Global signals

The European stocks opened weak and extended their losses in the early trading hours with the banking stocks leading the pack of losing stocks. At the time of writing this report FTSE 100 was trading 0.60% lower.

All the major Asian indices closed lower today. Shanghai Composite was down 2.34% while the Hang Seng shed 1.22%. SGX Nifty closed 41 points lower.

US stock futures opened weak with marginal losses. Investors are looking for data related to Initial Claims for December 12 and Continuing Claims for December 05, 2009.

Indian indices

The overall lethargy seen over the past two weeks continued this day too. Opening almost flat, at 16912, Sensex slid to touch an intra-day low of 16826. The day’s high was 16979 and select consumer durable stocks did attract investor interest. At closing bell Sensex was almost back of square only 18 points lower at 16894. Nifty closed only 0.30 points lower at 5042.

Sensex sentiment

Market breadth, the number of advancing shares to declining ones, was negative marginally. Of the 2,840 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,628 stocks advanced, whereas 1,173 stocks declined. Eighty four stocks closed unchanged.

Sectoral & stock screening

Consumer durable and healthcare stocks witnessed some investor interest with the BSE CD and BSE HC up by 1.72% and 1.44% respectively. Realty stocks have been under pressure for some days and the sector was down by 1.11% for the day. The rest of the sectors were either marginally up or down.

The star stock for the day was Pantaloon Retail that was up by 8.42% to be followed by Zee Entertainment that surged by 5.67% and Torrent Power that rose by 5.43%. DLF slid the most by 3.70%, followed by United Spirits that fell by 2.84% and Unitech that shed 2.19%.

Viewing volumes

Realty giant Unitech was the most actively traded share with over 1.44 crore shares changing hands on the BSE followed by wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy (1.21 crore shares), IFCI (1.15 crore shares), the largest realtor DLF (0.49 crore shares) and HDIL (0.48 crore shares).