LACKLUSTRE

The markets opened on a affirmative note and continued to trade like this throughout the trading session, except at the start of the second half of the trading session, when the markets lost all their gains and briefly entered the negative zone, but from that point onwards the markets almost made a V shaped recovery and touched their intraday high, but again, within the last half an hour, the markets lost almost all their gains, and ultimately both the indices ended in the positive after recovering part of their losses.To sum it up the entire trading session was a roller-coaster ride. The Nifty and the Sensex closed up by 17 & 37 points respectively. The market breadth remained positive till the end of the session, with 915 advances to 538 declines. On the sectoral front, the Midcap sector was the biggest gainer, followed by the Pharma and the Energy sectors. On the individual stocks front, ACC, Sterlite, HCL Tech, Tata Motors & Jindal Steel were the star performers for the day. On the institutional side, there was hardly any activity with the  FIIs and DIIs turning net buyers to the tune of merely 120 & 44 crores respectively in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, the scenario was almost same, where FIIs brought Index futures worth 186 crores and sold Stock futures worth 8 crores. Nifty future closed at 5122, with a moderate increase in open interest. On the options side the PCR increased to 1.25, along with a slight fall in the India VIX by 1.57%. On the Call options side, the 5300 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5200 call, on the other hand the 5000 call lost the maximum open interest followed by the 4900 & 4800 calls. On the Put options side, the 5000 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5100 & 5200 puts, while the 4700 put lost the maximum open interest. The entire activity in the F&O space, indicates addition of fresh longs in the futures and options front, in anticipation of positive news flow from the international markets. 

On the technical side, once again Nifty managed to close above the 5100 mark, with increase in volume, which augurs well for the markets in the short term. On the candlestick charts, Nifty was in a indecision period today, which was validated by the relatively low participation from the institutional side. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be 5154, 5163 & 5174 on the upside and 5094, 5062 & 5039 on the downside. On the currency front, the Rupee depreciated considerably and the USD- INR future closed at 56.21 for the day. 

On the international markets front, the Asian and the European markets have closed on a strongly positive note, but the U.S. markets are trading in the red, on the back of investors weighing the European discussions to fight the debt crisis and the impact of Federal Reserve's  extension of the "Operation Twist" till year end. On the energy futures front, both the Brent and WTI crude futures are trading deep in the red, at 93.09 & 81.94 $/bbl respectively, after the unexpected rise in the U.S. crude oil inventories.Meanwhile the Natural gas future is  trading almost flat at 2.54 $/MMBtu.