Mkt has lost momentum, gains made last week

The Nifty has given up more than 100 points in two days. This has reversed the games made last week. Towards the last week of December, we saw a bit of a flourish on low volumes for FII's. That seemed to have ebbed away. This week, we are back down to the 6000 kind of levels. Thankfully, that level has held out. Today, we came very close to 6020, but then NTPC, Reliance and TCS came together to balance some of the losses from other sectors.

Today, the hardest hit was the cement space with Ambuja and ACC. They lost quite a bit of ground of about 5% apiece. Bajaj Auto continued to be in a slide mode. Lot of the heavyweight names like ONGC, L&T, HUL were behind the fall today. There must have been some institutional selling in some specific largecap names. Today, banks were not the leaders of the fall. But that does not mean that they were spared. SBI had a fall once again and ICICI Bank was down too. Sterlite, in metals, had a pretty bad session once again. Midcaps once again had a bad day. Yesterday, they had poor breadth and today, it observed about 1:3 advance-decline ratio which is not going good. Fertilizers also got dropped today. Many of the stocks were down between 5% and 7%. Yesterday, after the GoM meeting, the stocks threw off a sudden negative surprise and were disappointing. Therefore, it was the leading looser sector today. Shree Renuka from sugar, Unitech from real estate, TVS Motors from auto, Praj from infrastructure and Nagarjuna Construction stood out on the losing side. LIC Housing also had a knock today. Some of the cement names like Prism Cement and Ultratech did not look good as well. There were not many winners in the midcap, but Binani Industries stood out and had a good run. Inox is still hot and Mahindra Satyam continues to see traction. Bhartiya International has a pretty good going today. It is not a great session and 6000 has held out for the day. Let us hope to close the week above that level. But, the market has lost some momentum over the course of the first week of 2011.