Disappointing day as mkts failed to recover Tue's losses

By Udayan Mukherjee, CNBC-TV18

The way the market rally started off it could have been much better. But sadly it was one more of those days that promised a bit in the morning but then petered out in the afternoon. It was a disappointment once again.

Not that today’s fall is big as compared to yesterday. But the fact that we could not recover even a small slice of yesterday’s losses is very disappointing. So, we are down by another 100 points on the Sensex, and it’s at sub-12,600 levels now.

Traders would say that this decisive close below 3,850 for the Nifty does not augur very well. So, we have now crunched down 45 points or 1% more on the Nifty to 3,816 and on very bad breadth too. It was about 380 advances to 900 declines today.

Early in the morning, it was panning out like a dead cat bounce. The Sensex went up about 250 points. But as it often happens in these kinds of bear rallies, it fizzled out and ran into a supply at higher levels. The second half of the day once again belonged to the bears. With a few exceptions, the stocks started drifting down.

The worst hit today were real estate stocks once again. Unitech was down 10-11%. DLF fell very sharply below 400. TCS, before its results, did not look very comfortable and sank to a three-year low today, and dragged down other stocks like Wipro with it. Autos were down and big stocks like Reliance, SBI, RPL, and Cairn India were down.

It could have been worse had it not been for some rearguard action in some of the bluechips like Bharti Airtel, and some FMCG stocks like ITC, Hindustan Lever and ONGC as well. They offset some of these losses in the other largecaps but couldn’t do enough.

The star of the day was Ranbaxy after the drubbing in the last couple of days. This morning there was a strong and assertive clarification from the management that the deal is on and that led that stock up 15% and there was some short covering there as well.

Midcaps had no great luck. There too, most of the stocks went down with the odd exception of sugar stocks and that is standing out in this fall. Amtek India caught the eye and the odd Alok Industries. But otherwise it was down. GMR Infra, Lanco Infra, JP Associates, were all down. Fertilisers stocks got hammered a bit and then many individual stocks like S Kumars, Voltas, Asian Electronics, Gujarat NRE Coke, and IDFC were some of the stocks that got hammered today.

So, it was not a good day for the market. We are now at sub-3,850. Supports come and go, and rallies and upmoves are very short-lived nowadays.