Strong global cues to push Indian indices up

Headlines for the day:

Government may relax FDI in retail

GMR Energy to raise Rs8,800 crore in debt

ACC's income from power sale rises four-fold

Events for the day:

Major corporate action

Tarapur Transformers IPO opens today
Ex-date for interim dividend of HCL Technologies
Results: Maruti Suzuki, Uco Bank, Bosch, Godrej Consumer
For more events, log on to Sharekhan.com

Pre-market report

Global signals

The European shares closed higher on Friday, led by banks, as Greece' request for an emergency loan and upbeat US home sales boosted investors' confidence, while Volvo rose after reporting strong results.

The US stocks rose to a 19-month high on Friday as Merck eased concerns about the impact of healthcare reform, saying its costs will be relatively low.

In today's trade, the Asian markets were trading in the positive territory, except Shanghai Composite. At the time of writing this report, SGX Nifty was trading 35.5 points higher.

Indian markets

With better home sales numbers and good earnings by the US stocks are some shines of recovery, post the Lehman crisis, this boosted the sentiments of the indices across the globe. The Asian indices rose almost 1% on an average. Even the problem area like Greece debt concern have requested for an emergency loan of 45 billion euros ($60.49 billion) from the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which seemed to a sign of recovery and bring some positive triggers for the Indian indices that may likely open gap-up. However, the market may remain volatile owing to the F&O expiry to be announced later this week, the earnings which will be released through the day and the late Friday and Saturday quarterly results announcements of Reliance Industries and ICICI Bank may have some impact on the stocks through the session.

Commodity cues

In the commodity space, the crude oil prices remained nearly unchanged over the past two weeks as crude oil dipped and recovered during the same period, with the Nymex light crude oil for the May series rose by $1.42 per barrel, whereas in the metals space, the Comex Gold for the May series rose by $10.80 and the Comex Silver for the May series was increased by $0.18 to a troy ounce respectively.

Daily trend of FII/MF investment in equities

On April 23, 2010, the FIIs were the net buyers of the Indian stocks to the tune of Rs1747.70 crore, whereas the domestic mutual funds, on April 22, 2010, were the net buyers of the stocks to the tune of Rs247.60 crore.