Market pulls back after yesterday's crash

The Sensex slipped into the red immediately after a positive start, but rebounded as buying began at the lower levels. The market gained amid choppy trading as bargain hunting for blue-chips began, overlooking the weak Asian indices and yesterday's drop of over 600 points. The Sensex got a boost in the afternoon trades after some Asian markets, especially Japan and Taiwan, managed to recover. The sustained buying in capital goods, banking and realty stocks saw the index touch the day's high of 15,135. However, profit bookings in late trades saw the Sensex shed most of its gains and the index to touch yesterday's close. However, hectic buying at the lower levels helped the Sensex to recover and end the session on a firm note by gaining 50 points at 14,986. The Nifty closed the session at 4,356, up 11 points.

The breadth of the market was positive, with the gainers outpacing the losers in the ratio of 1.09:1. Of the 2,636 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,338 stocks advanced, 1,225 stocks declined and 73 stocks ended unchanged. Most of the sectoral indices closed with significant gains. The BSE CD index was the major gainer and soared 2.06% followed by the BSE Realty index (up 1.71%) and the BSE Bankex index (up 1.51%).

Most of the heavyweights gained on the BSE. Among the blue chips, SBI shot up by 2.87% at Rs1,593, Tata Steel soared 2.65% at Rs639,Reliance Communication surged 2.15% at Rs542, BHEL advanced by 2.13% at Rs1,699, Reliance Energy added 2.01% at Rs752, Maruti Udyog moved up 1.86% at Rs836, ACC scaled up 1.78% at Rs983 and Dr Reddy's Lab was up 1.37% at Rs631. Among the laggards, Wipro dropped 2.83% at Rs462, M&M slipped 2.59% at Rs676 and Tata Motors shed 2.23% at Rs652 while TCS, Infosys and ONGC fell over 1% each.

Consumer durables stocks were in the limelight and closed with strong gains. Gitanjali Gems jumped 6.13% at Rs270, Blue Star soared 5.03% at Rs291, Titan Industries surged 2.61% at Rs1132 and Videocon Industries added 1.47% at Rs373.

Over 2.60 crore IFCI shares changed hands on the BSE followed by Faccor Alloys (82.84 lakh shares), Reliance Natural Resources (74.10 lakh shares), Spice Telesystems (52.33 lakh shares) and IKF Technologies (38.28 lakh shares).

SBI clocked a turnover of Rs179 crore on the BSE followed by Everonn Systems (Rs154 crore), Reliance industries (Rs150 crore), IFCI (Rs146 crore) and Housing Development & Infrastructure (Rs143 crore).