It is the last trading day before Christmas and when we come back next week, we will be into the last week of the year. Markets have got in a bit soft in the last few days but we had a reasonably satisfactory close for the market yesterday.

Today, we have got a couple of hikes to content with as well. Iron-ore prices have been hiked between two of the largest players, HDFC Bank says it is hiking PLR by 150 bps and we had some interesting rallies in specific sectors yesterday. So all in all, maybe we are not in for such a dull Friday of trading.

We have had a frenetic 7-8 days in the market and yesterday was probably the first sign that maybe things were beginning to quieten down little bit. The range of volatility reduced quite a bit and maybe going into the last week of the year, we will probably see the market just quieten down the volatility a little bit and trade in a bit of a range.

Lot of players would be missing from the market so maybe just getting into that kind of groove. Of course, there is an F&O settlement to do next week so maybe we may not have the wild kind of swings that we have got used to over the last 7 days, I don’t know whether we will drift down a little bit in the last one week that is entirely possible.

Global cues:

The US was very quiet and it slipped a little bit. Nikkei is a bit soft this morning, Straits Times is up half a percent, Taiwan is up a third of a percent and Kospi and Hang Seng are very quiet as well.

The emerging markets were all in the red, not by too much though, just about a quarter of a percent. So there are no great cues coming in from the emerging markets as such.

Contd on Pg 2....