Nifty closes above 5250; power, telecom, oil exploration up

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The benchmark Nifty ended the day with modest gains, but rose 2.5% this week. The index strengthened a bit in the last one hour of trade. Mark Matthews of Macquarie Capital Securities said Indian markets should continue to trade sideways. Macquarie Capital Securities has a positive bias on India.

Oil & gas exploration, power, cement, auto and telecom stocks along with SBI, HUL, HDFC Bank, SAIL, PNB, Tata Steel, Cipla, L&T and Jaiprakash Associates helped the Nifty to close above the 5250 level.

However, selling in HDFC, TCS, ICICI Bank, Infosys, DLF, BHEL, Jindal Steel, M&M, Axis Bank, Hindalco, ABB, Sterlite Industries, BPCL, Ranbaxy and HCL Tech limited the gains to some extent.

Telecom was the leader in today's session on the back of news of bidding for 3G spectrum. Idea Cellular has bid for nationwide 3G spectrum while Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications applied yesterday. India's largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel rallied 4% and was the top gainer today, Bharti has tied up with Apple to sell 3G iPhone in India. Among the others, Idea Cellular and Rel Comm gained over 2% each. MTNL rose 3%, the company will get Rs 1400 crore tax refund.

Heavyweight Reliance Industries was the leading counter on the Nifty, gained 1.4%. Among the other oil & gas stocks, Cairn India was up 0.74% and BPCL up 0.25% while BPCL slipped 0.78%.

Power stocks also witnessed buying interest; Power Grid rose 2%. NTPC, Suzlon Energy, Reliance Infrastructure, Reliance Power and Tata Power gained 0.6-1.34%.

The 30-share BSE Sensex closed at 17,578.23, up 58.97 points and the Nifty rose 16.90 points to 5260.05, after trading in a day's range of 17,502.14-17,600.87 and 5237-5269.95, respectively.

Nischal Maheshwari of Edelweiss said, "We continue to remain positive on the market. I think markets are going to see a breakout on the upper side. We think the market is headed towards 5,400-5,500 in the short-term."

Global markets were also quite supportive; Asian markets closed positive. European markets were trading 0.5-0.8% higher, at the time of closing of Indian equities.