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Equities gain marginally

Equity values gained marginally on the Bombay Stock Exchange on second successive day on Wednesday following limited buying support from domestic institutional investors and select share purchased by the foreign institutional investors.

The market opened higher with good buying support from local financial institutions -- Unit Trust of India and Life Insurance Corporation of India -- which improved the market sentiment and equity prices drifted up during the intraday trading session.

At the fag end, bull operators coupled with financial institutions started booking their profits at the higher level and eased share prices modestly, leading brokers said.

Union Finance Secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia statements made recently at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Hong Kong that India would continue to simplify procedures and speed up decision-making, and is committed to economic reforms to woo foreign investment also aided the upward trend, brokers added.

The BSE Sensitive Index (30 scrips) opened higher at 3834.97 points, touched the day's high of 3864.25 points, low of 3823.01 points, before closing at 3825.91 points, showing a marginal gain of 03.49 points as against the previous close of 3822.42 points.

The BSE-100 index finished at 1666.63 points over Tuesday's close of 1664.46 points, gaining 02.17 points. The BSE-200 and dollex indices settled down at 373.22 and 171.23 points as compared to the last trading day's close of 373.38 and 171.11 points respectively.

The continuous appreciation of the Indian rupee in the forex market against the US dollar made FIIs cautious about invest in the Indian capital market. They bought a limited number of Castrol India and TELCO shares. Otherwise, they had adopted the attitude of wait-and-watch, another broker said.

The total turnover on screen-based trading system at the exchange was Rs 6.98 billion involving 30.7 million shares and the number of trades were 71,025.

Tobacco giant ITC continued with the highest turnover at Rs 1.5 billion, followed by Reliance Industries Rs 1.1 billion, Tata Tea Rs 789.2 million, SBI Rs 782.8 million, Castrol India Rs 612.9 million, TELCO Rs 248.1 million, Colgate Rs 203.7 million, BHEL Rs 181 million, TISCO Rs 147.9 million, Hind Lever Rs 106.3 million, ACC Rs 86.6 million, ICICI Rs 79.5 million, Guj Amb Cement Rs 76.2 million, Hind Petro Rs 44.6 million and MTNL Rs 43.7 million in the specified counters.

Good transactions were witnessed at ICICI Bank, Satyam Computers, Infosys Tech, TVS Suzuki, Aptech Limited, Bank of Baroda, Foseco India, Tamil News P, Mico, Nicholas Pir, Lakshmi Elec, Lakshmi Mach, Cipla, NIIT, and Reliance Petro at the 'B1' counters.