Expiry week: Global cues to dominate sentiment, says Udayan

CNBC-TV18's managing editor Udayan Mukherjee says global cues are going to be at the top of everyone’s minds heading into expiry week for the April series.

The dollar continues to remain below the 80 mark, and crude hasn’t rallied significantly from USD118 per barrel levels, and these are comforting factors. However, early signs from France do not look good for President Sarkozy and that brings into question the impact the elections will have on the EU pact. Chinese data is also soft which might cause to market to be rangebound this week. Back home, from an earnings point of view, there is TCS today, a couple of important ones like Sterlite and Axis Bank over the week and a few like midcaps like Petronet LNG, Bata and Hexaware, but this is not the big week for earnings so the market will be more focused on expiry. TCS is important today because that should not disappoint after the mixed results of Infosys and HCL Tech, but that’s it. Earnings will not be the key driver for the market; instead it will be global markets which still appear in a range, so an expiry between 5200 and 5400 looks most likely. On the index, the Nifty ended below 5300 on Friday and sluggish global cues may cause it to stay below that level this morning as well. In the early part of the week it looked like the Nifty was going back to almost 5400, but even a closing sub 5300 did not inspire much confidence. More than the Nifty, worry seeped in in some of the infrastructure names and they way they started crumbling across the board on Friday. A lot of these stocks were down 4-5%, so the broader market plus leadership on the way down from infrastructure did not go down very well with the street at all. As of now, the market is still floating in a range; there are days of optimism and pessimism depending on whether the Nifty is closer to 5200 or 5400, but essentially it is within that 200 point trading range and it looks most likely that the expiry on Thursday will be somewhere between 5200 and 5400 which would make for a fairly flattish kind of series. With April out of the way, people will start gaining what the May series outcome will be given that April turned out be fairly flattish, so tough call from hereon. Watch the accompanying video for more details..