Market ends upbeat, gains 206 points

Robust vehicle sales numbers, positive global cues and two days of holidays charged the bulls to get off with a rousing start. The Sensex opened with a huge positive gap of 116 points at 13,988 and zoomed to cross the 14000 mark within a few minutes of trades. The mood was so positive that none of the Sensex components were down in early morning trades and the Sensex touched the intra-day high of 14107 on across-the-board buying. The market remained range-bound with a positive bias in the afternoon. Profit taking in a few select heavyweights saw the market ease towards the close but sustained buying in majority of the Sensex stocks prevented the index from falling further. The Sensex ended the session with decent gains of 206 points at 14078, while the Nifty added 56 points to close at 4144.

The breadth of the market was positive. Of the 2,659 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,547 stocks advanced, 1,024 stocks declined and 88 stocks ended unchanged. Among the sectoral indices the BSE Oil & Gas Index jumped 2.84% at 7338 followed by the BSE CG Index (up 1.85% at 10,063), the BSE Metal Index (up 1.83% at 10,015) and the BSE PSU Index (up 1.49% at 6499).

Barring a few select counters, most of the heavyweights ended at higher levels. Among the blue chips Bajaj Auto shot up by 4.34% at Rs2,551, Reliance Industries soared 4.04% at Rs1,623, Ranbaxy surged 3.42% at Rs384, Gujarat Ambuja Cement advanced by 3.14% at Rs122, Hero Honda added 3.08% at Rs705, Bharti Airtel moved up 2.72% at Rs834, Larsen and Toubro scaled up 2.65% at Rs1741 and Grasim was up 2.06% at Rs2,493. Among the laggards, Tata Motors dropped 2.18% at Rs734, HDFC Bank slipped 1.96% at Rs1,006, HLL tumbled 1.81% at Rs196 and Reliance Communication shed 1.12% at Rs472 while Wipro and Hindalco closed marginally lower.

Oil stocks were in the limelight and closed with strong gains. BPCL jumped 3.96% at Rs347, HPCL soared 3.65% at Rs280, Reliance Natural Resources surged 2.14% at Rs26 and IOC advanced by 1.90% at Rs449. Peronet LNG, ONGC, Gail and Reliance Petroleum gained marginally. Among the capital goods stocks, Triveni Engineering vaulted 8.73% at Rs52, Areva surged 8.71% at Rs1,289, Alstom Projects advanced 7.65% at Rs512 and Jyoti Structures gained 5.62% at Rs200.

Over 3.28 crore IFCI shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Tata Teleservices (1.70 crore shares), Nagarjuna Fertilizers (95.07 lakh shares), FSL (69.55 lakh shares) and Dish TV (56.84 lakh shares).

IFCI clocked a turnover of Rs154 crore on the BSE followed by Reliance Industries (Rs138 crore), Network 18 Fincap (Rs113 crore), Tech Mahindra (Rs113 crore) and Reliance Communication (Rs112 crore).