Good start to week, strong buying lifted Nifty: Udayan

It has been a good start to the trading week, says Udayan Mukherjee, managing editor, CNBC-TV18.  Monday's session started flat, but as the day progressed, there was a combination of short covering and may be a bit of strong hand buying as well, which lifted the Nifty.

At one point it was knocking on the doors of 6100 and finally closed nearly 100 points up. It was a good day both for the large caps and the midcaps.  In contrast, the previous week was very subdued. We had a couple of bad days, the market closed below 6000. This week was supposed to start on a tentative note – that was exactly what happened in the morning. European markets were quite steady while we were closing trade. So, that also might have rubbed off on the margins. Reliance Industries (RIL) was the star in the large cap space, because of the new KG-D6 gas find the stock started strong and closed with a flourish up nearly 5 percent.Bharti Airtel also played a good foil to Reliance on Monday. HDFC was strong. The Bank Nifty was up nearly 1.5 percent. So, that helped. Stocks like Sun Pharmaceuticals and Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) also did quite well. Auto stocks like Maruti and Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) were very subdued. So, that was not the space where the action was. The market breadth was good and the midcap index was up more than 1 percent. A lot of clusters did quite well. So, ADAG Group stocks were very strong. Reliance Broadcast, Reliance Capital, Reliance Communications, these were stocks which did quite well in Monday’s trade.In the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) space it was Britannia which shone because of very strong results. Titan had a good comeback. Stocks like Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company (SPARC), Ashok Leyland, JM Financial and Hindalco were also amongst the winners in Monday’s trading and Hexaware from information technology (IT) stood out with its strength. Some losers, stocks like Crompton Greaves, did not do very well, because numbers were very poor. Also, the aviation stocks like Jet Airways and Spicejet remained quite subdued for most of the day. However it is a good start to expiry week and must have taken off a little bit of the gloom of the last few days.