Nifty ends above 8500, Sensex up 518 pts; PSU banks lead

Moneycontrol Bureau

Ahead of Independence day, the market ended with a bang with great support from banks, auto, IT, pharma and infra stocks. The midcaps did even better with the index rallying over 2 percent.

The Sensex was up 517.78 points or 1.9 percent at 28067.31 and the Nifty was up 162.70 points or 1.9 percent at 8518.55. About 1795 shares have advanced, 1057 shares declined, and 129 shares are unchanged.

Vedanta, ICICI Bank, SBI, Reliance and HDFC were top gainers while Dr Reddy's Labs and Infosys were losers in the Sensex.

PSU banks lead the rally on Dalal Street as the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is expected to announce a slew of measures including capital infusion details, new appointments and ways to tackle bad loans.

Wholesale prices contracted for the ninth straight month. July WPI declines faster-than-expected to minus 4.05 percent due to weak food and fuel prices. This is the lowest level since June, 1976.

International markets may have been thrown into a turmoil after China's sudden move to devalue the yuan but the Chinese currency could not have been sustaining itself at such high levels says Marc Faber, author of Gloom Boom & Doom report. The move could just give the US Federal Reserve another opportunity to hold on to all key rates for now.For the whole week, the Sensex was down 0.6 percent, Nifty slipped 0.5%. Midcap index was down 1.4 percent, BSE Smallcap index was down 2.8 percent. Among the other indices, Metals was down 10 percent, Oil & Gas was down 5 percent while IT was up 4 percent, Pharma gained 3.1 percent.