November ends on a high; rupee firmer by 90p

CNBC-TV18 managing director Udayan Mukherjee explains that the day's session was spectacular. Rarely is there such a combination of price and volume and such leadership from the large-caps and today, the market was never in doubt. It started with a small gap-up and just continued going through the course of the trading session.

Finally, the Nifty closed above 5,800 to post a new high for 2012. In two days, there was a reversal of 200 points on the Nifty, which was the trading range for the entire months of October and November.
Though the November series was long and expired on Thursday, the settlement couldn’t have been better. Though the market closed only at about 2.5 percent higher for the series, there were some really remarkable gains in sectors like telecom, real estate, media, and textiles. So, it was a really good session, particularly for individual stocks.
The day was more about large-caps because though mid-caps did well in pockets, they trailed the large-cap performance leading to the belief that global investors might have been quite active.
Blue-chip stocks like ICICI Bank, HDFC, HDFC Bank, Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto and Asian Paints drove the market today.
It could have been better had it been for Infosys, which was down 1.5 percent because of concerns of no pick-up in growth. Otherwise, the Nifty might well have been at 5,850 by the end of the session.
However, the mid-caps did not fare badly. Stocks like Suzlon and real estate stocks like Unitech, Indiabulls Real Estate and HDIL also had a good session.
Infrastructure stocks performed quite well. Stocks like Nagarjuna Construction Company Limited (NCC), IRB Infra and Hindustan Construction were up.
Banks like IndusInd Bank and Karnataka Bank, and textile stocks like Bombay Dyeing also did well. Of course, after the PVR-Cinemax deal both those stocks moved up quite sharply.
One of the large investors put up a large block of Apollo Hospitals stock for sale and that was the reason the stock closed 8 percent lower. United Spirits saw the first signs of profit-taking after that big rally which took the stock to nearly Rs 2200.
The rupee had a good today after a lot of weakening which has been worrying a lot of market participants. But from that Tuesday low of 55.70, the rupee closed higher today at almost 54.80. So, it has been almost a 90 paise- Rs 1 swing on the rupee-dollar equation.