Nifty closes rangebound session on flat note

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The benchmark Nifty closed rangebound session on a flat note on Friday. It was a quiet session for the markets and the Nifty remained in a narrow range of 5,475-5,500.

The market is in no mood to change its current position, believes Rajan Malik of Anand Rathi Financial Services. Nifty will continue to face tough resistance at 5550-5600 levels. It can go down to 5,350-5,400 on the downside and 5,550-5,600 on the upside. He says there is no evidence of any market-moving trigger in the periphery, and the only visible trigger at the moment is the second quarter results.

Even there were no cues from global markets, which are eyeing US non-farm payrolls for the month of August 2010. Economists are expecting to see a loss of 110,000 jobs in August, an improvement over July's 131,000 jobs loss.

David Cohen, the Director of Action Economics is still seeing the drag from the one off in the ten year census jobs. "Even though, the total payrolls are likely to decline by something around 80,000-100,000 in August, the market is still looking for a moderate increase in the private payrolls maybe 50,000. That's still a rather sluggish number but at least it will continue positive."

Back to Indian markets, metal, capital goods and select technology companies' shares along with Reliance Industries, ITC, ICICI Bank, HDFC, Tata Motors, Tata Power and Maruti witnessed selling pressure.

However, the markets got support from ONGC, Bharti, Infosys, SBI, Hero Honda, HUL, Reliance Infrastructure, Ranbaxy Labs, NTPC, HDFC Bank, M&M and Cipla along with realty companies' shares.

The 30-share BSE Sensex closed at 18,221.43, down 16.88 points and the 50-share NSE Nifty fell 6.75 points to settle at 5,479.40. However, the broader indices outperformed benchmarks today as well; gained nearly 1% each. For the week, equity benchmarks rose more than one percent.
 
Heavyweight Reliance Industries witnessed profit booking; down 1.25%. Among the other oil & gas stocks, BPCL was down 1.55% while ONGC was up 1.3% and GAIL was up 0.4%. Metal segment was also under pressure; Jindal Steel, Sterlite Industries and Hindalco were down 1.5-2%; Tata Steel was down 0.6% and SAIL was down 0.2%.