INDECISIVE

The markets opened with a gap down , tracking its Asian peers and continued to trade in the same range and touched their intraday lows, at the end of the first half of the trading session, strangely from this point onwards the markets made a smart recovery and recovered most of their losses and ultimately both the indices almost closed flat. The Nifty and the Sensex closed down by 19 and 60 points respectively. The market breadth also recovered considerably, but ultimately closed in the negative with 681 advances to 778 declines. On the sectoral front, the Metals sector was the biggest looser, followed by the FMCG, while the rest of the sectors closed almost flat or slightly in the negative zone. On the individual stocks front, ONGC, Kotak Bank, Bank of Baroda, Cipla & Maruti were among the few, which managed to buck the trend. On the institutional side the FIIs were net sellers to the tune of 174 crores, while the DIIs were net sellers to the tune of a mere 1.27 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, FIIs brought Index futures worth 150 crores  and sold Stock futures worth 343 crores. Nifty future closed at 5151, with 5 points premium, to the spot, along with a considerable, loss of open interest. On the Option side, the PCR marginally fell to 1.18, along with a rise in the India VIX by 3.21%. On the call options side, the 5200 call lost the maximum open interest, followed by the 5300 & 4900 calls. On the Put options side, the 4900 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 4800 & 5100 puts. The activity in the F&O space indicates slight liquidation of longs, as well as put writing at the lower levels also, on the back of expectation of positive news flow from the government, which may lead to a smart pullback.

On the technical side, once again Nifty managed to close, above the 5100 mark on healthy volumes, and most of the technical indicators are also supporting the markets, but the point to be noted is that Nifty has been stuck in the 100 points range of 5070 - 5170 for the last 11 trading sessions. A breakout is about to happen, but which way, will be largely dependent on the news flow and the futures expiry, that lies ahead. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be, 5176, 5199 & 5238 on the upside and 5106, 5068 & 5053 on the downside. On the currency front the once again the rupee touched its lifetime low, and the USD-INR future finally closed at 57.29 for the week.

On the international market front, the Asian and the European markets closed on a negative note, while the U.S.markets managed to close on a very firm note. On the energy futures front, both Brent and WTI crude futures closed up by close to 2% , at 90.98 & 79.76 $/bbl , and the Natural Gas futures also closed up by 1.67%, at 2.62 $/MMBtu for the week.