Mkts trading rangebound and low volumes

It was not a bad day for the market one would have to say. A couple of 100 points up on the Sensex, which looked like an unlikely result in the middle of the session when we went absolutely flat but towards the end of the day, there was a little bit of a move or bump up in the market again and in the context of what's happened across us today, it cannot be said that we have had a very bad day.

China was down 5.5% today. Other global markets were a bit softish with most of them closing about a percentage point down. Europe was a bit weak while we were trading in the afternoon. So we got away with about 1-1.5% gain on the index, which isn’t too bad.

We are still within a trading range, no question about that but even so at least for the day, we have notched up couple of 100 points. The Sensex is back upto 15,800 and the Nifty has got back to around 4,750. The market breadth is good - that’s the good thing for the last couple days that the broader market is looking a bit healthier. So midcaps and smallcaps - both the indices actually outperformed the Sensex and Nifty today. The breadth was good and the volumes were very low as always.

Couple of interesting numbers came in today though it’s just the early days of this earnings season. Yes Bank came in with numbers, which were ahead of street expectations. They had no derivative loses and that I think inspired not just that stock but other private banking stocks as well, so ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank - all had good home runs today. Capital goods’ stocks have corrected quite a bit but today they came back, so BHEL is back with 5% rally. L&T, ABB, and Siemens India - all those stocks did pretty well today. They have got hit quite hard in the last 10-days. Tata also from oversold grounds saw bit of a short covering rally and we saw power stocks led by Suzlon, Tata Power, Reliance Energy etc all looking pretty okay.

So, not a bad day for largecap names but with few exceptions - FMCG is still correcting a bit and some of the other real estate stocks like Unitech also cooled down a bit. In midcaps there were lots of winners. Sugar was the top sector today. Balrampur Chini, Bajaj Hindusthan, Triveni, Shree Renuka all of them doing well. Mastek, which came in with good numbers and well ahead of expectations perhaps rubbed off to the other midcap IT names. So we had good rallies inAptech, NIIT Tech,3i Infotech, Sasken Comm, Geometric Soft, Sonata Software that whole cluster looked good. Tea had another good session and we saw some dribs and drabs in other midcap names.

All in all, it was not such a bad day for the midcap end of the market. Orchid Chemicals cooled off a bit as Ranbaxy came out and said that they have no interest in making a hostile bid for Orchid, so that stock just rested and gave up about 3-4%. All in all, it was not such a bad day but still rangebound and low volumes.