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Bullish trend overseas rubs off on BSE; Sensex up 70 points to 4558.23

The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex shot up by 70 points and surged past the 4,500 mark as share prices staged a smart rally at the country's premier bourse on heavy buying support from foreign institutional investors and local operators at the first day of current settlement today.

Dealers attributed the spurt in share prices to the ongoing bullish trend on the leading bourses overseas. They said the continuous gain in the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong, Nikkie in Tokyo and FTSE-100 in London boosted market sentiments on the local bourses. Earlier in the day, the market firmed up on reports that opinion polls indicated a comfortable majority for the BJP-led alliance in the September-October national election.

Reflecting the firm trend, the 30-share BSE Sensitive Index (Sensex) opened at 4560.31 points, touched the day's high of 4585.39 points, a low of 4548.39 points, before closing at 4558.23 points, showing a net gain of 70.36 points or 1.56 per cent from the previous close of 4487.87 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also registered a handsome gain of 44.49 points to 2034.59 points from the previous close of 1990.10 points.

The shares benefitted from today's rally were Bajaj Auto, BHEL, BSES Limited, Cadbury, Global Telesystems, Glaxo, Grasim, IPCL, L&T, Mahindra & Mahindra, MTNL, Nestle, SBI, Sterlite, Tata Engineering, Tata Power, Tata Tea and Wockhardt.

Dealers said that the bull run on the overseas bourses which started end of the last week have boosted market sentiments on local bourses.

The Hang Seng index at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange shot up by 286.60 points to 12,894.78 points. The Nikkie index was up by 390.86 to 17,826.03 points. The FTSE-100 posted a marginal fall of three points during the opening session and quoted at 6,242 points, dealers said.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices rose by 11.78 and 4.68 points and closed at 467.23 and 179.16 points as against the previous close of 455.45 and 174.48 points.

The BSE-500 index gained by 12.85 points to 1378.47 points from the previous close of 1365.63 points.

Total turnover on the BOLT system at the BSE reported during the day was Rs 19.43 billion.

L&T topped the list of turnover by registering the highest turnover of Rs 1.47 billion, followed by Ranbaxy Rs 1.39 billion, Digital Equipment Rs 1.22 billion, ACC Rs 1.18 billion, Zee Telefilms Rs 916.4 billion, Satyam Computers Rs 903 million, Pentafour Software Rs 853.8 million.

Other actively traded counters were Reliance (Rs 674.4 million), Infosys Technologies (Rs 611.2 million), ITC (Rs 610.7 million), Telco (Rs 606.7 million, SBI (Rs 531 million), Tisco (Rs 412 million), MTNL ( Rs 350.3 million) and Sterlite (Rs 344.8 million).

UNI

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