SIDEWAYS

The markets opened on a positive note and touched their intraday highs within the initial one hour of trade and continued to trade 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 losing their momentum and ultimately lost all their gains and closed almost flat till the end of the session. The market breadth also turned extremely negative with 556 advances to 880 declines. The Nifty and the Sensex closed up by 10 and 47 points respectively. On the individual stocks front, HCL Tech, Tata Motors, HDFC, ONGC and M&M were the top five Nifty gainers while Rel Infra, Tata Power, Sesa Goa, Bajaj Auto & Power Grid were the top five Nifty losers for the day. On the institutional side FIIs were net buyers to the tune of 800 crores while DIIs were net sellers to the tune of 290 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, FIIs were net buyers in Index futures and Options to the tune of 152 and 645 crores while they were net buyers in Stock futures to the tune of 911 crores and net sellers in Stock options to the tune of 19.51 crores. Nifty future settled at 5936, with just 3 points premium to the spot, with a marginal increase in open interest. On the Options side, PCR stood at 1.05 along with a fall in the India VIX by 1.11%. On the Call options side, the 6200 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 6100 & 5900 calls, while the 6000 call lost the maximum open interest. On the Put options side, the 5900 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5700 put, while the 5600 put lost the maximum open interest, followed by the 5800 and 6000 puts. The entire activity in the cash markets was stock specific while in the F&O space there was some profit booking along with Call writing at the higher levels of the market.

On the technical side, once again Nifty managed to hold on to the 5900 mark, albeit with very modest gains, but the underlying market breadth was very weak, indicating that the modest gains were due to some short covering on the options side. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be 5966 an 5988 on the upside and 5913 & 5894 on the downside. On the currency front, the Rupee strengthened today, as domestic shares gained and domestic trade deficit did not widen as much as some analysts had feared. The partially convertible Rupee finally closed at 53.82, while the near month USD-INR future settled at 53.96 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 positive note and the U.S. markets markets are trading with minor losses. On the energy futures front, both the Brent and WTI crude oil futures are trading almost flat at 117.72 & 97.39 $/bbl respectively while the Natural Gas future is trading up by 2.60% at 3.31 $/MMBtu