Mkt outperforms global peers, closes flat ahead of expiry

Indian shares have seen a consolidation for the third consecutive session Wednesday after the benchmarks hit a 14-month high last Friday. The 50-share NSE Nifty, which has been in a range of 5650-5700 since the beginning of this week, fell 10.45 points to close at 5,663.45 ahead of F&O expiry tomorrow.

Indian markets outperformed global peers, which may be attributed to consistent inflow of foreign money and hopes of more measures from government to review the sluggish economy.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have net bought more than Rs 19,000 crore highest monthly inflow since the February 2012 - worth of shares in September so far (including yesterday’s provisional figure). Yesterday, FIIs have bought over Rs 5,800 crore worth of shares highest one-day inflow since February 24 as per provisional data available on NSE website.

Jitendra Sriram of HSBC India says market looks a little vulnerable, having hogged more than its share of flows -- almost USD 15 billion in 2012. He says markets have a habit of sometimes running ahead of fundamentals, which seems the case right now. "They (market) will need to pause and allow fundamentals to catch up and I suspect this is going to be such a phase from hereon," he told CNBC-TV18.

The 30-share BSE Sensex lost 62.24 points to end at 18,632.17 while Nikkei tanked 2 percent. Shanghai declined 1.24 percent and Hang Seng was down 0.8 percent.

Major European markets went down 1-2 percent (at 15:31 hours IST) on concerns over Eurozone debt crisis and riots in Spain ahead of a new round of austerity measures that due to be announced tomorrow. Peripheral markets like Spain’s IBEX and Italy’s FTSE MIB tumbled over 2.5 percent.

Patrick Legland, Global Head of Research, Societe Generale said, "The market now is back to reality." The euphoria over the ECB's bond buying programme and a third round of quantitative easing or QE3 from the US Federal Reserve seems to have worn off.

Back home, top telecom operator Bharti Airtel topped the selling list with a fall of 4 percent while Reliance Communications lost 1.56 percent.

Commercial vehicle maker Tata Motors and aluminium major Hindalco Industries fell 2 percent each. Country’s largest coal mining company Coal India was down 2.8 percent.

Housing finance company HDFC and private sector lender HDFC Bank were down 1 percent each. Public sector lender State Bank of India gained 1.4 percent.

Engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro, software services exporter TCS and state-run oil & gas producer ONGC declined 0.6-1 percent.

Cigarette major ITC rose 1 percent and index heavyweight Reliance Industries went up 0.5 percent.

Two-wheeler maker Hero Motocorp was up 1.6 percent and drug producer Cipla rallied 2.66 percent.

Cement makers hogged the limelight today; ACC and Ambuja Cements surged nearly 4 percent. India Cements shot up 7.6 percent.

The broader markets outperformed benchmarks; the BSE Midcap Index was up 0.3 percent and Smallcap rose 0.65 percent. The market breadth was neutral.

In the second line shares, Pantaloon Retail rallied for the second consecutive session today, rising 4 percent. It was the most active today and had gained 10 percent yesterday.

Kingfisher Airlines jumped 9 percent ahead of lenders meet tomorrow.

State-run REC and PFC fell 3-4 percent on profit booking. IFCI lost nearly 6 percent after the SEBI has approved a proposed hike of the government's stake in the company to 55.57 percent to make it a state-run company.