DIRECTIONLESS

Once again the markets opened on a negative note and touched their intraday lows within an hour of the start of the first half of the trading session, and continued to trade rangebound with a negative bias for greater part of the trading session, but with just half an hour let for the end of the day’s session, the markets recovered all their losses and managed to close marginally in the positive zone. The Nifty and the Sensex closed up by 8 and 22 points respectively. The market breadth also recovered and managed to close on a marginally positive note, with 724 advances to 629 declines. On the sectoral front, there was hardly any activity, with, most of the sectors closing with marginal gains or losses. On the individual stocks front, Hindalco,  Sesa Goa, Bharti Airtel, Ambuja Cement & Jindal Steel were the top five Nifty gainers, while Tata Motors, Ultratech Cement, Dr. Reddy, NTPC & Coal India were the top five Nifty losers for the day. On the institutional side, FIIs were net sellers to the tune of 545 crores, while DIIs were net buyers to the tune of 416 crores in the cash market.

On the derivatives side, FIIs were net sellers in both Index futures and options to the tune of 360 and 1075 crores respectively, while they were net buyers in Stock futures and net sellers in Stock options to the tune of 629 and 35 crores respectively. Nifty future settled at 5823, with just 1 point premium to the spot along with a considerable increase in open interest. On the options side, PCR stood at 0.89, along with a marginal increase in the India VIX by 0.93%. On the Call options side, the 6000 call added the maximum open interest, followed by the 6100 & 5900 calls. On the Put Options side, the 5700 put added the maximum open interest, followed by the 5800, 5600 & 5500 puts, while the 5900 put lost the maximum open interest, followed by the 5400 & 6000 puts. The entire activity in the F&O space indicates some long positions on the higher side of the market along with long positions on the Put options side, negating the entire effect and indicating directionless movement.

On the technical side, Nifty continued to struggle near its immediate resistance of 5850 for the third consecutive session and with the persistent selling by the FIIs, not backed by an equal amount of buying from the DIIs may lead to further weakening form these levels. As said earlier much of the direction will be provided by the major policy announcements this week, the event to watch now is the Fed Policy meet. The levels to watch out for Nifty will be 5840, 5859, 5877 on the upside and 5790, 5763 on the downside. On the currency front the Rupee rose today, but remained within close of its record low hit last week as outflows from equity ‘markets added to concerns about funding of the current account deficit ahead of the U.S. Fed’s decision on its stimulus programme. The partially convertible finally closed at 58.71, while the near month USD-INR future closed at 58.81 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 negative note and the U,S. markets have retreated following a two day rally, as investors await the outcome of the Federal Reserve meeting, On the Energy futures front, the Brent crude oil future is trading marginally up by 0.25% at 106.28 $/bbl, while the WTI crude oil future id trading down by 0.27% at 98.41 $/bbl and the Natural gas future is trading up by 1.78% at 3.97 $/MMBtu.