COMMENTARY
INTERVIEW
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Sensex rise continues, gains 62.15 points

With Christmas and the New Year holidays approaching, foreign institutional investors kept themselves away from the capital market. However, local institutions invested sizeable amount in bluechips stocks including Reliance Industries Limited, State Bank of India, Tata Tea, Castrol India and Bajaj Auto, leading brokers said.

The market opened higher following short covering by the bear operators and speculative buying support, another broker said, and added that with overall sentiment in the market being good, it will move further up for next couple of weeks.

Mirroring the uptrend, the BSE Sensitive index (30 scrips) opened at 3458.27 points, touched day's high of 3499.26 points, low of 3455.10 points before closing down to 3487.02 points showing a net gain of 62.15 points as against the previous close of 3424.87 points.

The BSE-100 index improved and crossed the psychological barrier of 1500 mark, finally closed at 1514.69 points over the last trading day's close of 1489.85 points gaining 24.84 points.

The BSE-200 and dollex indices rose by 05.63 and 02.30 points to 338.22 and 142.70 points as compared to yesterday's close of 332.59 and 140.40 points respectively.

The stability in the interbank foreign exchange market helped improve the sentiment in the capital market, brokers added.

The volume of business was thin. The total turnover was Rs 7.9 billion involving 29.4 million shares. Out of 6857 scrips, a total number of 1568 scrips were traded.

ITC registered the highest turnover of Rs 2.8 billion followed by Tata Tea Rs 878.6 million, SBI Rs 852.7 million, RIL Rs 753 million, Castrol Rs 645.8 million, ACC Rs 199 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 197.2 million, TELCO Rs 150.9 million, BHEL Rs 116.2 million, MTNL Rs 113.5 million, TISCO Rs 112.7 million, Hind Lever Rs 95.4 million, Colgate Rs 59.7 million, HDFC Rs 52.9 million and ICICI Rs 49.9 million in specified counters.

Good transactions were observed at Infosys Tech (Rs 27.2 million), Corporation (Rs 17.7 million), Cummins (Rs 9.6 million), Satyam Comp (Rs 9.6 million), Cipla Ltd (Rs 5.5 million) and Tata Infotech (Rs 4.1 million) in the 'B1' counters.

UNI