COMMENTARY
INTERVIEW
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Reliance surge pushes Sensex up 9 points

Market leader Reliance led the upward trend on Monday as the Sensex surged ahead by about 9 points on good buying support in the company circle on restricted purchasing by bull operators on the opening day of current settlement cycle on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The market opened with short covering at blue chip counters by the foreign institutional investors as well as domestic institutional investors coupled with bull operators, which made the equity prices shoot up.

The market sources said that during the intraday trading session, FIIs sold about 800,000 to 1 million shares of tobacco giant ITC and considerable amount of Castrol and RIL scrips.

Domestic institutions including State Bank, Life Insurance Corporation, General Insurance Corporation and Unit Trust of India have reportedly booked profits at higher level.

This week, market players are expecting a favourable half-year result announcement from Reliance, and are hopeful of a favourable outcome at the Securities Exchange Board of India's meeting on Wednesday in New Delhi to discuss the J S Verma Committee's recommendations on the modified badla system.

The 10 per cent backwardisation transaction was done on Friday at the prime counters like Reliance and ITC, which was the highest backwardisation attracted by these scrips in the recent past, leading brokers said.

Resuming on the uptrend, the BSE Sensex opened higher at 4093.92 points due to buying support, crossed the barrier of 4100 mark, and touched a day's high of 4118.92 points. Later, profit booking at higher level resumed and it came down to 4056.48 points before recovering to close at 4066.05 points as against its previous close of 4057.37 points, showing a net gain of 08.68 points.

The broadbased BSE National Index (100 scrips) gained by 05.72 points to 1751.88 points over last Friday's close of 1746.16 points.

The BSE-200 and dollex indices increased by 01.61 and 0.93 points to 390.25 and 179.38 points as compared to last trading day's close of 388.64 and 178.45 points respectively.

The total turnover was Rs 12.2 billion involving 39.6 million shares, number of trades were 92,743. Reliance registered the highest volume of the business with a turnover of Rs 5.1 million followed by ITC Rs 3.1 billion, SBI Rs 874.6 million, Castrol Rs 435 million, ICICI Rs 303.5 million, Tata Tea Rs 287.8 million, TISCO Rs 242.8 million, ACC Rs 228.6 million, Colgate Rs 121.9 million, Hind Lever Rs 110.7 million, TELCO Rs 94.6 million, L and T Rs 90.4 million, MTNL Rs 71.1 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 67.9 million and Reliance Cap Rs 57.9 million in the specified counters.

Good transaction were observed at Bank of Baroda, Infosys Tech, ICICI Bank Corporation, Satyam Comp, Nicholas Pir, Him Fut Comm, Madras Cem, Credit Rati, Reliance Pet, Aptech Ltd, Dig Equip, LML Limited, and Carborundum at 'B1' counters.

UNI