Nifty ends below 8600, Sensex consolidates; ITC slips 2%

The bulls maintained momentum on Dalal Street. After a sluggish day, the market geared up to rally at end.  However, Nifty’s attempts to scale 8600 was not successful even though banks supported. Over all, it was a day of consolidation.

The Sensex was up 75.05 points or 0.3 percent at 28298.13 and the Nifty ended up 20.70 points or 0.2 percent at 8588.65. About 1392 shares have advanced, 1537 shares declined, and 143 shares were unchanged.

Midcaps cooled off after recent surge. The recent rally in midcap shares is just beginning of a sustained uptrend, and not a bubble waiting to burst, says Ratnesh Kumar, independent market expert. Fundamentally, midcaps are more leveraged to the recovery in the economy, says Kumar. He says traditionally, domestic investors have had more conviction about investing in midcap shares.Adrian Mowat, Managing Director & Chief Strategist for Asian and Emerging Market Equity, JP Morgan, however, remains cautious of dramatic rise in midcaps and believes if the RBI keeps rates unchanges even in the second half of this year, market may react negatively. He advises investors to remain with largecap stocks.

Meanwhile, retirement fund body EPFO has kickstarted the process of investing in the stock market on Thursday with an initial corpus of around Rs 5,000 crore through ETFs in the current fiscal. The Ministry had notified new investment pattern for Employees' Provident Fund Organsiation (EPFO) in April allowing the body to invest minimum of 5 percent and up to 15 percent of its funds in equity or equity related schemes.

Buzzing stocksL&T, Dr Reddy's Labs, Lupin, Tata Motors and SBI were leaders while ITC, Coal India, Vedanta, Reliance and Wipro were losers in the Sensex. Dr Reddy's Laboratories hit a life high of Rs 4325 per share up more than 3 percent intraday on signing a marketing agreement with American pharma company Amgen. Bharti Airtel was in focus (ended 0.6 percent down) as it launched its high speed 4G services in 296 towns across India. Airtel also announced tie-ups with Flipkart and Samsung for bundling 4G handsets with its services. Most sugar stocks rallied on reports of Prime Minister endorsing to explore possibility of increasing sugar exports by looking at various options including the barter trade of the sweetener against import of farm items lifted the sugar prices, a trader said. Apart from exports, the sugar ministry is also considering raising cess on sugar sale from existing 24 paise per kg to shore up falling domestic prices.