Mkts see largecap leadership, short covering

By Udayan Mukherjee, CNBC-TV18

It has been better news for the market. We had a fairly bad weekly closing on Friday. Today, we have recouped most of those losses. So, it is good going today.

There was no start of a trend or anything like that. These days, markets are very volatile and it is extremely shallow. Everyday, we see about USD 10-11 billion of trade, which is about Rs 40,000-45,000 crore and price moves get very exaggerated because of that.

On down days, we lose 3-4% easily on the index and on up days we gain quite effortlessly too. So, moves are exaggerated and it looks very good when it goes up and looks terrible when it goes down. But, essentially, we are in a trading range and moving this way and that.

Today, there was an upmove which has brought us back to about 15,800 thereabouts for the Sensex and got us back to about 4,770-4,760 for the Nifty. So, it has not been bad. We have almost got back to where we fell off on Friday.

There was good largecap leadership and perhaps a bit of short covering as well today because global markets looked quite supportive.

The US is the strongest market right now. We had strength in Asia led by China today which put on 4.5%. India and China have been the beaten down markets over the last one-week. So, both India and China pulled back today and it was all thanks to largecaps.   

FMCG has a great run today whether its HUL, ITC, Colgate or Dabur; all those stocks were up. Ranbaxy, in pharmaceuticals, looked very smart. Most of the beaten bank stocks came back today. So, whether it is SBI, PNB, Union Bank, ICICI Bank, Bank of India or even smaller ones like IOB and Dena Bank, they looked very smart.

But the big sectoral move today was IT. IT has been strong and supporting the market these last few days. It is going into the Infosys guidance quite strong and today was no exception. There were good moves in Wipro, TCS, Infosys and Satyam today and largecap names like Reliance, ONGC and DLF did pretty okay.

All in all, there was a good largecap showing with the exception of capital goods, which did not have a very good session. BHEL recovered towards the end but underperformed in today's market. ABB and a few auto stocks also looked a little weak.

On midcaps, there were plenty of flyers. There is some talk that Ranbaxy’s promoter company is circling Orchid and has picked up a large stake. We saw Orchid go up 20% in today’s trade. There has been a lot of recovery in Indiabulls Securities, which had a fairly bad re-listing but has picked up today.

We had a listing today, a small stock called Sita Shree Foods. It had a Rs 30 issue and ended the day closer to Rs 44. So, there was a good listing there.

Gujarat NRE Coke and Hindustan Oil Exploration certainly deserve mention. There was a bit of buying in some textile stocks today. Stocks like S Kumar’s, Alok Industries and Crompton Greaves had a good run. Some of the exaggerated moves of recent listing like GSS America Infotech and Tulsi Extrusions came off today. Few of the construction stocks also did not look very strong.

But the day belonged to the largecaps. There was partly short covering and a bit of buying on a few of the big index names.