HESITANT

The markets opened on positive note and touched their intraday highs within the first hour of trade, but post that point the markets started losing their gains and ultimately lost all their gains and briefly entered the negative zone in the second half of the trading session, but surprisingly recovered from that point onwards and managed to recover some part of their losses and ultimately both the indices managed to close on a positive note. The Nifty and the Sensex closed up by 22 & 29 points respectively. The market breadth also closed on a very positive note with 1145 advances to 373 declines. On the sectoral front, the Midcap sector was the biggest gainer followed by the Banking, Pharma, IT and Energy sectors. On the individual stocks front, DLF, Cairn, Rel Infra, JP Associate & Dr. Reddy were the top five Nifty gainers, while Sesa Goa, Jindal Steel, NMDC, Tata Motors & Coal India were the top five Nifty losers for the day.  On the institutional side, FIIs were net buyers to the tune of 313 crores and DIIs were net sellers to the tune of 269 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, FIIs were net sellers in Index futures to the tune of 417 crores and net buyers in Index options to the tune of 469 crores, while they were net buyers in both Stock futures and Options to the tune of mere 85 & 22 crores respectively. Nifty future settled at 5706, with just 2 points premium to the spot, along with a considerable increase in open interest. On the Options side, PCR stood at 1.02, along with a decrease in the India VIX by 2.43%. On the Call options side, there was profit booking form the 5000 to 5500 call, while the  5900 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5800 & 6000 calls. On the Put options side, the 5600 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5300 & 5500 puts. The entire activity  in the F&O space indicates addition of longs on the higher side of the market along with put writing at lower levels, indicating some sort of range formation in the Nifty.

On the technical side, Nifty somehow managed to close above the 5700 mark, but further upmove will depend a lot on the international news and the domestic political scenario. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be 5724, 5759 on the upside and 5679, 5655 on the downside.

On the international markets front, the Asian markets have closed deep in the red, while the European markets have managed to closed on a fairly positive note and the U.S. markets are trading with losses as a report showed American manufacturing expanded less than forecast in March. On the energy futures front, the Brent crude oil future is trading up by 1.08% at 111.20 $/bbl while WTI crude oil future is trading down by 0.29% at 96.95 $/bbl and the Natural gas future is trading almost flat at 4.02 $/MMBtu.