Markets bit choppy on expiry day

CNBC-TV18’s Executive Editor, Udayan Mukherjee – It has been a bit choppy market as the expiry days and it’s a bit tired as well. So Nifty struggled a bit in this 5000-5,050 zone for most of the day and is now trading below 5,000. It’s not sold off anything like that just a mere 0.5% down, but even so it’s not been able to progress after crossing 5,000 early part of the week. For most of the last three days it’s just been hovering a bit above that 5,000 mark, trying to make something of it. Midcaps, too, have lost their way a little bit, may be just profit booking, no more but it looked a bit tired through the day.

What’s happening in the futures market is that rollovers perhaps have slowed down a bit because of the dithering that the Nifty has done above 5,000. It crossed an important level but then in the next 50-points it spent a lot of time, 3 full days which is quite a bit in the context of the market and has not made much headway. It might just be consolidation but the fact that it’s not been able to clear. 5,100 is probably just about injecting first germ of doubt in the mind of traders which is why they are not rolling over as aggressively as they did over on Monday and Tuesday.
 
So maybe it is that why the market has paused a bit. We had good run in global markets, people are apprehensive that there might be a bit of slack coming in from there as well. All things put together, a bit of tiredness has crept in. We are up 13% from the lows in just a few weeks time and so the markets had a good rally maybe it’s the markets way of catching up, so we will find out as we start the May series. More than today, tomorrow would be important if the global cues are good and supportive then we could start the series with far more force but we need to watch tomorrow.
 
Today is just about getting done with the settlement and the recent history of the gains probably putting a little bit of pressure at the top.