RESTLESS

Surprisingly the markets opened on a very subdued note and continued to trade with a negative bias throughout the day, but the just after one hour of the second half of the trading session, the markets started recovering slowly and ultimately recovered all their intraday losses, to close marginally in the positive till the end of the session. The Nifty and the Sensex closed marginally up by 7 & 19 points respectively. The market breadth also recovered considerably to close marginally in the negative with 758 advances to 776 declines. On the sectoral front, the story was the same where the Energy sector was the biggest gainer, while the rest of the sectors closed marginally in the positive or negative zone. On the individual stocks front, Cairn, Gail, BPCL, ONGC & BHEL were the top five Nifty gainers, while Tata Steel, Jindal Steel, Hindalco, Sesa Goa & HDFC were the top five Nifty losers for the day.  On the institutional side, FIIs were net buyers to the tune of 1164 crores while DIIs were net sellers to the tune of 825 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, FIIs were net sellers in Index futures to the tune of 255 crores and net buyers in Index options to the tune of 771 crores in the Index options, while they were net sellers in Stock futures and Options to the tune of 95 & 171 crores respectively. Nifty future settled at 6048 with 32 points premium, along with a marginal decrease in open interest. On the Options side, PCR stood at 1.19, with a marginal decrease in India VIX by 0.75%. On the Call options side, the 6100 call added the maximum open interest, while there was uniform loss of open interest from the 5000 to 6200 calls. On the Put Options side, the 5700 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5800, 6000 & 6100 puts. The entire activity in the Cash markets was stock specific while in the F&O space there was some profit booking in the Index futures as well as Call options, along with corresponding put writing from the lower levels to hedge the long positions.

On the technical side, Nifty somehow managed to close above the 6000 mark for the second consecutive session, and above the crucial resistance of 5978 for the third consecutive session, indicating a breakout has happened and the levels to watch out for Nifty will be 6030, 6044 & 6069 on the upside and 5978, 5966 & 5952 on the downside. On the currency front, the Rupee weakened for the second session on Friday, on the back fo dollar demand from oil and defence firms, while the global risk-off mood also prompted short-covering of dollar positions. The partially convertible rupee closed at 55.07, while the USD-INR future settled at 55.33 for the week.

On the international markets front, the Asian markets closed on a mixed note, while European and the U.S.markets have closed in a mildly positive note. On the Energy futures front, the Brent crude Oil future closed down by 0.74% at 111.31 $/bbl, while the WTI crude oil future closed up by 0.18% at 93.09 $/bbl and the Natural Gas future closed up by 2.78% at 3.29 $/MMBtu.