ANTICIPATION

The markets opened on mildly positive note and continued to trade rangebound with a positive bias for the initial two hours of the trading session, but from this point onwards the markets made an almost vertical ascent and touched their intraday highs in the first hour of the second half of the trading session and continued to hold on to their intraday gains till the end of the session and ultimately both the indices closed very near to their day’s high. The Nifty and the Sensex closed up by 50 & 162 points respectively. The market breadth was also positive with 819 advances to 679 declines. On the sectoral front, the Banking sector was the biggest gainer followed by the FMCG, Energy & Pharma sectors.On the individual stocks front Bharti Airtel, JP Associate, ICICI Bank, LT & Jindal Steel were the top five Nifty gainers, while HindUnilever, Heromotocorp, TCS, HCLTech and Infosys were the top five Nifty losers for the day. On the institutional side, FIIs were net buyers to the tune of 744 crores and the DIIs were net sellers to the tune of  301 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, there was hardly any activity, where the FIIs were net buyers in Index futures and Options to the tune of 163 & 189 crores respectively, while they were net sellers in Stock futures to the tune of 111 crores and net buyers in Stock options to the tune of mere 14 crores. Nifty January future settled at 5964 with 58 points premium to the spot along with a considerable addition of open interest. On the Options side PCR stood at 0.93, along with a fall in the India VIX by 2.69%. On the Call options side, the 6000 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5900 & 5800 calls, while on the Put options side, 5900 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5800 & 6000 puts. The entire activity in the Cash markets was sector specific while in the F&O space, it was mainly rollover activity which took centre stage and the rollovers point to a positive outcome in the January series.

On the technical side, once again Nifty managed to cross the 5900 level, with marginal increase in volumes, but since today’s rally was mainly led by short covering, it remains to be seen, whether Nifty breaches the overhead resistance of 5947, in order to resume another upmove. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be 5928, 5951 & 5986 on the upside and 5852 & 5818 on the downside. On the currency front , the Rupee rose to a near one week high, buoyed by hopes of continued strong capital inflows as shares posted a strong show. The partially convertible Rupee finally settled at 54.83, while the near month USD-INR future settled at 54.89 for the day.

On the International markets front, the Asian markets have closed on a fairly positive note, while the European markets have closed on a almost flat note and the U.S. markets are trading with little change as a better than expected rise in home price data was overshadowed by U.S. budget negotiations. On the Energy futures front both the  Brent and WTI crude oil futures are trading up by 1.68 & 2.47% at 110.66 & 2.48 $/bbl respectively and the Natural Gas future is trading up by 1.08% at  3.41 $/MMBtu.