Midcap participation positive for mkts

It was a bit of a volatile ride today. We finally closed flattish. On the Sensex, we were just 70 odd points down, and the Nifty was down 15-18 points. 

The big story is that the broader market looked very good today. So, a few largecap names like Reliance, ONGC, HDFC and TCS might have kept the largecap Indices under check. But the midcap Index was up 2.25% today. That is not small. We were almost 3:1 on advance-decline ratios. So there was good breadth, good performance from midcaps and smallcaps. But the big Indices did not go anywhere. So we were stuck below 14,600 for the Sensex and the Nifty just closed a touch below that 4,400 mark. It didn't give up too much ground, but just a little bit on the back of some largecap names.

However we saw some good performances in metals. SAIL and Tata Steel did well and even some of the smaller ones like Ispat, Lloyd Steel, and Sunflag Iron didn't do too badly. We had Ranbaxy moving up today. RPL had a good session. There were some cement companies that moved up on hopes that prices may go up at the end of August. Grasim and ACC moved up just that little bit.

HCL Tech responded to numbers. The operating numbers were good and the stock moved up 6%. But then the action was not really there; but outside the Index. Many trading favourites like TTML and RNRL and Ispat did very well. Some of the infrastructure names like GMR, Hindustan Construction, and GVK Power were all quite a bit. Polaris had a good session in technology. There were a lot of circuit-up, stocks like GHCL, and LML. There were at least 10 stocks that went up 20%. Bata had a good session; a few sugar stocks did not do too badly. So one can find a lot of nice colour in the midcap space today. But the largecap names were very quiet.

Even so, it was a flat day. Given that Asia was down largely 1.5-2%, we might have got away pretty light.