Market gains 59 points

The strong global markets and prevailing strong bullish sentiment helped the Sensex to open with a huge positive gap of 130 points at 14468. The wide-based National Stock Exchange's Nifty hit an all-time high of 4296 points within the mid-morning trades. The Asian indices like China's Shanghai Composite Index and South Koria's KOSPI Composite Index also hit news highs, while a rally in metal prices and a stronger dollar helped to add gains in the Japanese export shares. Mirroring the same the Sensex gained 189 points on touching the day's high of 14527. The buoyancy in heavyweights and banking stocks kept the market bias up but the market moved in a narrow range throughout the session. Profit booking in a few front-line stocks towards the close dragged the Sensex to the intra-day low of 14368. The Sensex finally wrapped up the session with the gains of 59 points at 14398. The Nifty closed the session at 4257 by adding nine points.

The breadth of the market was positive. Of the 2,661 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,470 stocks advanced, 1,094 stocks declined and 97 stocks ended unchanged. Among the sectoral indices the BSE Bankex advanced by 1.29% at 7564 followed by the BSE Auto index (up 1.19% at 4918) and the BSE HC (up 1.26% at 3793). However, the BSE IT index, the BSE Metal index and the BSE Teck index closed in negative territory.

Select front-line stocks notched up significant gains. HDFC Bank rose 5.23% at Rs1,125, L&T advanced 2.65% at Rs1,785, Gujarat Ambuja Cement climbed 1.93% at Rs116, Maruti Udyog surged 1.87% at Rs825, Cipla scaled up 1.61% at Rs208, Bajaj Auto added 1.49% at Rs2,203, HDFC jumped 1.45% at Rs1,845, ACC moved up by 1.39% at Rs870, Reliance Communications gained 1.28% at Rs510 and ICICI Bank was up 1.01% at Rs922. Among the laggards, HLL slipped by 1.28% at Rs201 and Infosys dropped 1.09% at Rs1965 while Reliance Energy, NTPC, Satyam Computer, Wipro, TCS and Bharti Airtel ended with marginal losses.

Banking stocks were in the limelight. Andhra Bank soared 5.43% at Rs91, Allahabad Bank jumped 4.99% at Rs89, Bank of Baroda scaled up 2.14% at Rs276, Oriental Bank advanced 1.85% at Rs234 and Canara Bank gained 1.63% at Rs262.

Over 3 crore Reliance Natural Resources shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Reliance Petroleum (79.56 lakh shares), Dish TV (60.16 lakh shares), Binani Cement (57.62 lakh shares) and Nagarjuna Fertilizers (46.09 lakh shares).

Value-wise India Infoline registered a turnover of Rs134 crore on the BSE followed by Unitech (Rs123 crore), Advanta (Rs119 crore), Reliance Natural Resources (Rs109 crore) and Reliance Capital (Rs98 crore).