It was a terrific day for the market. One of the best days that we have had in 2008 or perhaps one the best days ever. It certainly was the second biggest single day gain ever for the Sensex and it looked fantastic today. On many counts, it is perhaps the best trading session that we have seen in a long time. Sure, we have had short covering rallies over the last few months but none have looked as broad, as strong as it did today.

Still early days of a pullback, so we don’t know what's to make of it but at least the start of a glimmer of hope is visible out there and that’s not just for the local markets. In fact today nearly 1000-point rally for the Sensex has its genesis in global markets. The US has been the most resilient of markets over the last few days and that’s spilled over to Asia this morning. The Hang Seng closed 6.5% up and many other markets were strong.

Europe opened 3-3.5% up in the afternoon and we took our cues from there. India has been a terribly oversold market, particularly the midcaps and smallcaps and today we have bounced with a lot of gusto. Nearly 6% rally actually for the Sensex and Nifty which has dragged the index back to 16,200 and the Nifty is back to nearly 4,900, so spectacular rally and no dearth of leadership at all.

But the good thing about today's rally was that it had breadth. In the last couple of days, we haven’t seen any meaningful breadth. The midcaps and the smallcaps were still down but today, the midcaps looked quite strong. The midcap index was up 6.5%. The Nifty Junior was up nearly 9% and the Smallcap Index did extremely well. The breadth was about 6:1 or 6 advancing to every declining stock - so all good out there.  

There was very good leadership. Starting with the technology pack, Infosys had almost a 10% bounce, Wipro, TCS, Satyam looked strong. We had good gains in some of the banks. ICICI Bank led it, good rallies in HDFC, HDFC Bank, Yes Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, they were all very strong today. Even public sector banks like SBI, Corporation Bank, Dena Bank looked very smart.

Real estate which was a beaten down sector, DLF and Unitech, sparked off a rally which spilled over to many of the smaller counters likeOrbit, Puravankara, the ones that got decimated yesterday. Reliance Energy on the first day of its buyback was a big winner up about 13% odd. All the heavyweights, whether it is an ONGC or Reliance or Hindustan Unilever, even Tata Steel, looked very smart.

Midcaps looked equally good, starting with the momentum boys. IFCI, Ispat, Nagarjuna Fertiliser and JP Hydro were all jumping in joy today at the sight of the Sensex. We had good rallies in some infrastructure stocks like JP Associates and GMR. Even the brokerages had a very good session. Edelweiss, Motilal Oswal, India Infoline had good rallies today and midcap technology was led by Aptech and NIIT Technologies. Deccan Aviation, IVRCL, beaten down REC, some of the sugar stocks, Reliance Capital. Today everything looked good, you could pick pretty much any stock and be up 7-10%.

So, a great day for the market. The big question being asked is are we forming a bottom out here or is it too early to say? Is it just a technical rally that takes us 8-10% and no higher? Can we scale 5,000 and stay above that? Will global markets also rally on and have we formed an intermediate bottom out there? All questions that will be answered in the course of the next few days. But for the day, we savour the rally and keep our fingers crossed and hope this is not just a one-off.