Rupee breach of 60/USD shoots fear into mkt: Udayan

The market mood on Wednesday was dominated mostly by the movement of the rupee, says Udayan Mukherjee, managing editor, CNBC-TV18. The Nifty came off, the breadth was bad and so the closing of the market was not great at all.

Below is the verbatim transcript of his market wrap on CNBC-TV18 The rupee was looking uncomfortable since the morning, trading around the 59.80 kind of level. It was looking dangerously close to 60 and then in the last half an hour of trade, it just let go as soon as it touched 60. When the stock market was closing, it went to levels of 60.30 and that injected such a lot of nervousness into the stock market. Also read: FII flows to return if RBI cuts rate; INR may touch 62: BoA The rupee held centre stage more than the stock market, no question about that. Lot of large-cap names like Bharti Airtel, Tata Motors, Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M), and banks like Kotak Bank and IndusInd Bank did quite poorly. Ambuja Cement from the cements sector and Ranbaxy from pharmaceuticals were also quite weak. Some frontline IT stocks like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and HCL Technologies held out. The odd National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and ITC did not do too badly, but not well enough to support the index . The breadth was also poor and Wednesday's trade saw a lot of names like Crompton Greaves, IFCI, Shree Renuka Sugars, India Cements and Karnataka Bank seeing some significant erosion in value, though a couple of them like IRB Infrastruture, JP Power and Manappuram came back somewhat. Mahindra Satyam also had a very good day. It was an otherwise disappointing day for stocks and a very disappointing one for the currency. With rupee having violated 60/USD, one does not know what the next important level for the rupee-dollar could be.