REBOUND

The markets opened on an absolutely flat note, and traded rangebound for the entire first half of the trading session, but just at the start of the second half of the trading session, the markets started gaining strength and gradually inched upwards with every passing hour and ultimately both the benchmark indices closed near their highest point of the day. The market breadth was also positive with 926 advances to 585 declines. The Nifty and the Sensex closed up by 55 and 180 points respectively. On the sectoral front the Midcap sector was the biggest gainer followed by the FMCG, Banking, Auto, Pharma & IT sectors. On the individual stocks front, Bank of Baroda, JP Associate, Reliance Infra, Maruti & Jindal Steel were the top five Nifty gainers, while Ultratech Cement, Tata Power, ACC, Coal India & Axis Bank were the top five Nifty losers for the day. On the Institutional side, FIIs were net buyers to the tune of 587 crores and DIIs were net sellers to the tune of 332 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, there was very little activity, where FIIs were net sellers in Index futures to the tune of 313 crores and net buyers in Index Options to the tune of 313 crores, while they were net buyers in both Stock futures and Options to the tune of 334 and 15 crores respectively. Nifty future settled at 6074 with one point discount to the spot along with a considerable loss of open interest. On the Options side, PCR stood at 1.06 along with a rise in the India VIX by 2.14%. On the Call options side, the 6100 call lost the maximum open interest, followed by the 6000, 5900 & 6200 calls, while on the Put Options side the 6000 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 6100 put. The entire activity in the cash market saw across the sector buying while in the F&O side the Index futures continued to shed their positions, and on the Options side, it was more of a short covering along with some Put writing at higher levels to hedge the long positions.

On the technical side, once again Nifty bounced back from the 6000 levels and closed strongly above it on the back of positive sentiments from the international markets and seems to have arrested the downslide temporarily that was supposed to begin after Thursday’s close. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be 6098 & 6122 on the upside and 6034 & 6006 on the downside. The key factors to watch out for next week will be RBI’s policy review on Tuesday and earnings of blue chip companies. The currency market was closed due to a holiday, hence there were no updates from this front.

On the international markets front, the Asian and the European markets closed on a very strong note, while the U.S. stocks rose for the week amid better than expected corporate earnings and economic data as lawmakers voted to temporarily suspend the federal debt limit. On the Energy futures front, both the Brent and the WTI crude oil futures closed almost flat at 113.28 & 95.88 $/bbl respectively, while the Natural Gas future also closed  flat at 3.44 $/MMBtu.