Market does about-turn

Today's major news

Phillips Carbon starts co-generation power plant; the stock rises 1.28%

HCL Technologies plans to buy OLR; the stock jumps 2.66%

JMC Projects bags contract worth Rs355 crore; the stock surges 1.53%

IVRCL bags road project worth Rs1550 crore; the stock ends the day 0.185 lower

REC net jumps 49% in Q3; the stock closed the day 1.43% lower.

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Post-market summary

Global signals

European indices are trading mixed on Wednesday. At the time of writing this report FTSE 100 is trading lower by marginal 0.15%, while DAX traded 0.17% higher.

All Asian indices closed lower on news of China tightening its monetary stance. SGX Nifty closed 29 points higher.

US stock futures opened marginally higher on Wednesday, as investors looks forward to treasury budget for December and crude inventories for the week ended January 08, 2009.

Indian indices

Brushing aside pessimistic cues from global markets, Indian market bucked the trend and turned positive after four successive days of losses on the back of continuing buying in information technologies (IT) stocks. In tandem with overseas markets, the Sensex opened 54 points lower and soon touched the day’s low of 17276. After touching the day’s low, the Sensex recovered all its losses and touched the day’s high of 17528. At closing bell, the Sensex closed at 17510, 87 points higher. Nifty closed 24 points higher at 5234.

Market sentiment

The market breadth was positive. Of 2,969 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,692 stocks advanced, whereas 1,195 stocks declined. Eighty two stocks closed unchanged

Sectoral & stock screening

On better-than-expected results and outlook by Infosys technology, IT sector remained up for the second day in row with the BSE IT up by 3.84% followed by BSE TECk that jumped 2.81%. On the obverse side, BSE Auto fell the most with the loss of 0.66% followed by BSE Bankex that slid 0.60%.

The star stock for the day was GTL Infrastructure that was up by 13.94% to be followed by PTC India that surged 5.56% and GTL that rose 5.36%. Lanco Infrastructure slid the most by 3.69%, followed by India Infoline that fell 3.19% and Mahindra & Mahindra that shed 2.91%.

Viewing volumes

GTL Infrastructure was the most actively traded share with over 1.50 crore shares changing hands on the BSE followed by Ispat Industries (1.02 crore shares), wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy (0.81 crore shares), India’s second biggest realty company, Unitech (0.72 crore shares) and industrial finance company, IFCI (0.57 crore shares).