Market ends upbeat, gains 133 points

The market displayed a positive trend, almost for the entire session, despite expectations of unwinding of positions on the last day of the May series of derivative contracts. Taking its cue from firm Asian markets, the Sensex opened with a gap of 40 points at 14451 and continued to rally further to touch the day's high of 14574 on buying in banking and capital goods stocks. The market remained range-bound thereafter, with a positive bias. However the announcement of the GDP numbers did little for the market despite a GDP growth of 9.1% in the fourth quarter of FY2007. The buoyancy in the consumer durables, especially in Videocon Industries and Fedders Llyod, lifted the BSE CD index to its record high of 4217. However, profit booking in some of the front-line stocks dragged the market to its intra-day low of 14449. The Sensex bounced back towards the close as short-covering in heavyweights helped the index to recover and end the session at 14544, up 133 points. The Nifty finally settled at 4296, up 46 points.

The breadth of the market was positive. Of the 2,565 stocks that traded on the BSE, 1,333stocks advanced, 1,154 stocks declined and 78 stocks ended unchanged. Among the sectoral indices, the BSE CD index notched up gains of 4.47% at 4195 followed by the BSE FMCG index (up 1.39% at 1907), the BSE Bankex (up 1.36% at 7607) and the BSE Auto index (up 1.30% at 5012).

The heavyweights witnessed strong buying interest. Hero Honda soared 5.01% at Rs732, HDFC Bank rose 3.18% at Rs1,140, Maruti Udyog was up 2.63% at Rs824, HLL shot up by 2.42% at Rs204, HDFC jumped 2.29% at Rs1,871, SBI added 2.09% at Rs1,352, Tata Motors gained 2.07% at Rs757, Bharti Airtel moved up by 1.98% at Rs848 and Wipro was up 1.59% at Rs545. However, Gujarat Ambuja slipped 1.74% at Rs113 and NTPC lost 1.19% at Rs158.

Over 1.56 crore Reliance Natural Resources shares changed hands on the BSE followed by MIC Electric (65.19 lakh shares), Insecticides India (58.78 lakh shares), SREI Infrastructure (54.71 lakh shares) and Reliance Petroleum (46.66 lakh shares).

Value-wise MIC Electric registered a turnover of Rs252 crore on the BSE followed by India Infoline (Rs112 crore), Unitech (Rs103 crore), Reliance Industries (Rs103 crore) and SBI (Rs83 crore).