WAIT AND WATCH

The markets opened on a flat note, and continued to trade in the negative zone till the start of the second half of the trading session, when the markets tried to pullback and with just one hour left for the end of the day's session, the markets touched their intraday highs, but gave up all their gains and ended almost flat. The Nifty closed absolutely flat with 0.3 points down, while the Sensex closed down by just 31 points. The market breadth was positive with, 991 advances to  501 declines. On the sectoral front, the FMCG sector was the biggest looser, while most of the sectors closed marginally in the positive or negative zone. On the individual stocks front, ACC, DLF, Grasim & HDFC bank were among the few stocks, which managed to outperform the market. On the institutional side, FIIs were net buyers to the tune of 591 crores, while the DIIs were net sellers to the tune of 447 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, there was hardly any activity, with FIIs turning net sellers in both Index and Stock futures to the tune of merely, 42 and 52 crores respectively. Nifty future closed at 5296, with 17 points premium to the spot, along with a modest increase in open interest. On the options side the PCR fell to 1.05, along with a marginal decline in the India VIX by 0.37%. On the Call options side, the 5500 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5300 & 5400 calls, while on the Put options side, the 5200 put added the maximum open interest followed by the 5100 & 4800 puts.The entire activity in the F&O space, indicates addition of fresh longs and at the same time put writing at higher levels, but the high sell figures from the DIIs negated the strong buy figures of the FIIs, which was clearly reflected in the market breadth, which deteriorated considerably till the end of the season, indicating the nervousness among the domestic participants, using every opportunity to exit the market.

On the technical side, Nifty has managed to close in the comfort zone, above most of its short and long term moving averages, with slight increase in volumes. It remains to be seen, whether Nifty will hold on to this level tomorrow amid mixed news flow from the domestic as well as the international front. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be, 5299, 5320 & 5338 on the upside and 5218 & 5170 on the downside. On the currency front, the Rupee once again appreciated considerably on the back of dollar sales by investors, following some clarity on certain taxation rules. The rupee finally settled at 55.43, and the USD-INR future settled at 55.71 for the day.

On the international markets front, the Asian markets have closed on a mixed note, while the European markets have closed on a firm note, but the U.S. markets are trading on a negative note on the back of manufacturing data which showed a unexpected fall for the first time in three years. On the Energy futures front, both the Brent and WTI crude futures are trading down by 1.81 and 2.67% at 96.03 & 82.70 $/bbl respectively while the Natural gas future is also trading down by 1.68% at 2.77 $/MMBtu.