Bad day for mkts; domestic factors played big role

The obvious one will be the global trigger because today wasn’t such a great day for global markets, but I think we have must been the worst performing market in the world today, so I don’t think it was just the global factors which led us down.

The domestic factors might have played a big role; in fact there were 3 strong head winds this morning when we got into trade, one of course was inflation, because of Friday figures, over the weekend, there were a lots of comments that came in from many of the policy makers suggesting that there could be some more monetary and fiscal tightening ahead, and that would not have gone done well with the market and you could have seen the impact on many of the rate sensitive sectors.

For the markets this morning, then was the ICAI guidelines, which probably indicate that many corporate would have to show up some of the mark to market losses in the current quarter itself. Legitimate or not, there are those fears in the market, and that was one big reason why many stocks came off quite sharply today, the possibility of having earnings dense in this current quarter rather than them being differed for future and of course last but not the least there was the global problem, Asian markets were weak, Europe opened up weak, and the market generally has the feeling that after a fortnight of resilience, the global markets are also beginning to come off a little bit.

So I suspect the combination of 3 factors, inflation, ICAI and the global weakness, was too much to deal with which is why we had this savage sell off.

Bank stocks feel understandably because inflation, interest rate concerns, and many economists are now talking about interest rates hikes and CRR tightening by the RBI and that cannot be good news, bond deals are hardening once again which is usually an indicator that bank stocks start underperforming, that was the primary reason I think, why banks did so badly today, but there might have been a side reason, because many of the banks have been at pains to talk the markets suggesting that they don’t have any mark to market hits on derivative positions, the market probably doesn’t believe that and maybe the ICAI ruling, that’s some thing to do with the way the private banks sold off today.

Ditto with IT, there clearly the RBI has stepped back a little bit and let the rupee appreciate to sub Rs 40 levels because it is a tool of controlling and tempering inflation a little bit and with that appreciation of the rupee, maybe IT and the confidence in the IT stocks has eroded somewhat, but the same ICAI problems might have also got a little bit to do with the way IT came off, because IT companies do dabble or use Forex Hedges quite aggressively and the market perhaps fears in its pessimistic frame of mind that there could be some mark to market losses for IT companies as well.