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Chautala's pro-BJP move brings glad tidings to market; Sensex zooms 216 points to 3572.91

The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex suddenly changed course for the better and shot up by more than 200 points as soon as the Indian National Lok Dal announced its unconditional support to the Vajpayee-led government.

Speculative buying was on a roll which helped the market gain confidence, after two days of political uncertainty.

"The market surged as a result of covering up of the oversold positions by the speculators, most of whom who were on the buying mode after it became known that there is still hope for the Vajpayee government,'' BSE brokers said.

''With Om Parkash Chautala's support, the marketmen are hopeful that important bills like the Finance Bill, Pharma Bill and the Insurance Regulatory Authority Bill will get a clean chit in the upper house as soon as possible,'' they added.

The market started on a low trend showing nominal movement in the Sensex since morning and oscillating within a specific range for the whole of mid-afternoon.

It gained momentum after noon when the INLD made its announcement of unconditional support and gained steadily in spite of total absence of foreign institutional investors.

Reflecting the bullish trend, the BSE Sensex opened nominally higher at 3370.96 points and reached a high of 3584.62 points during the day. The lowest point today was 3348.60 mark but again pulled itself together to record a close of 3572.91 points, gaining hugely by 215.79 points, as compared to its yesterday's close of 3357.12 points.

The BSE-100 also gained smartly by 88.34 points to close at 1547.21 points as compared to 1458.87 points. It touched a high of 1549.03 points and a low of 1449.81 points after opening at 1461.93 points for the day.

The BSE-200 and Dollex also recorded gains of 19.68 and 7.88 points to close at 353.54 and 137.66 points respectively.

The market is hoping that the Vajpayee-led government will sail through the motion of confidence in Parliament tomorrow and expect the this development to augur well for the economy.

The total turnover on the BOLT system reported during the day was Rs 13.17 billion for 154,207 trades out of the total volume of shares traded for Rs 42.8 million.

Pentafour Software topped the list of turnover by registering the highest turnover of Rs 2.31 billion, Satyam Computers was close in the second position with a turnover of Rs 2.17 billion followed by ITC Rs 881.8 million.

Other actively traded counters were Tata Tea (Rs 384.7 million), Infosys Technologies (Rs 388.1 million), Zee Telefilms (Rs 299.6 million), Reliance (Rs 367.2 million), Digital Equipment (Rs 279.3 million), SBI (Rs 327.3 million), ACC (Rs 240.9 million), Glaxo (Rs 288.5 million), NIIT (Rs 190.7 million) and BHEL (Rs 167.1 million).

UNI

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