The Sensex didn’t do too badly today. We had almost a 300-point move. But it is not that kind of a convincing day for the market. In fact if you look outside the index, it will not give you a very good feeling.

For most of the day, the midcap index hovered between 2-3% down. It finally closed about 1.5% down. The smallcap index spent most of the day between 3-4% down and closed finally around 2-2.5% down. So, not a good going for the broader market. In fact on a day when the Sensex has put on a couple of percentage points, we have had very poor market breadth with almost 4 declining stocks for every advancing stock. That cannot be very comforting. So you have got a very polarised kind of market today.

A few largecap names like HDFC, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Bharti, TCS, HCL Tech, Wipro and some FMCG stocks like Lever and ITC propelled the index up. So, you had a 300-point move on the Sensex. Even the Nifty got past 4600 with a nearly 1% move. But if you looked outside of that, the picture was nowhere as good. In fact, you would think that for a large number of investors, traders and portfolio holders, it has not been a good day for the market at all.

On the largecap space, we had a few disappointments. Metals being principally among them. We have had a commodities pullback and that has hit many of the metal stocks fairly hard. Tisco, Sterlite, SAIL and even smaller ones like Ispat, Hindalco had a bad session and real estate was the other segment, which got singled out for punishment today, whether it was DLF Unitech, Parsvnath, Puravankara, Orbit. Cairn among the largecap oil names had a very bad session with a 10% fall there. Reliance Energy did not have a good move.

On the midcaps, two days back it was Orchid and today it is S Kumars that led the fall or was the big beating boy. It was 25% down in a single session. There could have been some forced selling from one of the funds that holds S Kumars in a large quantity. Gujarat NRE Coke was another that was singled out for punishment. And all the momentum stocks, whether it is RNRL, Ispat, IFCI, JP Hydro, TVS Motor, Ashok Leyland had very sharp falls today.

Many good quality stocks fell off very sharply too. Aban Lloyd had a Rs 500 fall in a single session, which was quite stunning. We had stocks like Neyveli Lignite falling off quite a bit. Many of the other midcaps like Adlabs, Noida Toll Bridge, Balrampur and Bajaj Hindusthan were stocks that came off not too much on the winning side. Dabur Pharma was one stock that stood out and deserves mention. That had a 13% upmove on a fairly quiet day for the market.

So, in summary a good Sensex performance, and reasonable performance from some specific largecaps. But bad at the broader end and the midcaps and smallcaps did not have a good session.