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BSE sustains Budget boom; Sensex zooms up 124 points, pierces 3,500 mark; infotech, pharma, FMCG and pivotals benefit the most; textiles, petrochem, auto and FIs down

The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex has surpassed the psychological barrier of 3500 points and zoomed up by over 124 points as the shares belonging to the Budget beneficiary sectors like infotech, fast-moving consumer goods or FMCG and pharma registered remarkable gains on frenzied buying by foreign institutional investors, leading domestic funds as well as bull operators in a volatile trading today.

The BSE Sensex had recorded 165 points gain on Saturday following a sharp recovery in the pivotals on announcements of various incentives to the capital market by Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha. With today's gain, the Sensex has gone up by 289 points within two consecutive trading sessions.

Tobacco giant ITC, Tata Tea, Hindustan Lever and L&T have posted hefty gains on heavy buying support from FIIs, dealers said. The market sentiment is bullish and likely to continue the trend for a longer period, a senior BSE broker said.

Reflecting the bullish phase, the Sensex opened at 3447.50 points, touched the day's high of 3539.62 points, fell below the 3500 mark to touch the day's low of 3417.22 points before closing at 3523.98 points, showing a net gain of 124.34 points over the previous close of 3399.63 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 index shot up by 52.78 points at 1559.73 points from the previous close of 1506.95 points.

It is also a rare event that the BSE upswing coincided the day of weekly settlement at the National Stock Exchange, Jignesh Shah, assistant vice president at AVP-Research at the Triumph International Finance Limited said, and added that the 289 points gain in two straight trading sessions after the Budget may be historical.

Pivotals also reported heavy gain on the NSE where the S&P CNX Nifty also crossed the psychological barrier of 1000 points and closed at 1015.80 points, showing a net gain of 34.50 points from the previous close of 981.30 points.

Back on the BSE, the BSE-200 and Dollex indices closed higher by 10.64 and 4.00 points to 358.33 and 140.34 points from the previous close of 347.69 and 136.24 points respectively.

Analysts pointed out that today's rally in the market was not across the board and some of the shares mainly representing textile, automobiles and petrochemicals reacted negatively to the Union Budget as they were expecting some special measures which however were not offered.

The scrips which witnessed downward movements were NOCIL, Bombay Dyeing, Arvind Mills, Mukund Steels, Colour Chem, IPCL repored major losses during the day. Shares of the financial institutions like IDBI, ICICI, IFCI also declined considerably, they said. UNI

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