Strong start to the week for Nifty, gains led by banks

Excerpts from Markets Today on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » ALSO READ See what other CNBC-TV18 anchors have to say Nifty BSE | NSE 10/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

There is good news from the market. The week has begun on a good note and a strong note. The Nifty put in a solid performance, and jumped another 100 points to close around 4,900. Global cues remained extremely supportive, Asia closed up well. Even the market breadth was excellent at 5:1 advance declines and volumes at Rs 95,000 crore remained pretty okay as well.

The star in today's trade was the banking sector. SBI and Axis bank led a rally across the board for the banking sector, public and private sector. Other largecap names like Reliance, ITC and SAIL also helped the Nifty. Only Bharti was the drag on the Nifty. 

The morning was interesting because it could have gone on either way; we started with a small gap up and then drifted into the red within half an hour or 45 minutes of opening and then in the second half of the day when the market started moving up, it didn't look back and closed very close to the highs of the day at 4,900 Nifty which is very encouraging and the Sensex is back to 16,500.

Today you couldn't pick a banking stock without it being up 6% or more, it was all about banking. On the day of the monetary policy or the day after, banks sold off because of some of the provisions which the markets construed to be quite damaging for earnings but now that cloud has passed clearly and we have seen an excellent rally across the board by SBI, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC, HDFC Bank, PNB and the smaller ones, Dena Bank, Central Bank of India, UCO Bank, Vijaya Bank, it was all across the board, the rally in banks.

The Nifty also took support from some largecap names like Reliance Industries which was up 3%. SAIL had a very good session of trade and M&M closed above Rs 1,000, so that's quite a special performance today as well.

On the way down it's telecom once again, and just when you think the sector has bottomed out, it starts falling again and today Bharti fell 4% on the day when the market was up 2%. So the blues are not over for that segment at all.

Outside the index, aviation did well, some of the hotel stocks came back today, Mahindra Satyam has to stand out as one of the stars in today's session as indeed should stocks like Maytas, Orbit and JSW Steel, so quite a bit moving around in the market.