The Hindu Business Line : Sensex greets New Year on bullish note

THE YEAR 2003 ended on a bullish note at the country's major stock exchanges. Despite high volatility throughout the day and a spurt in profit-booking towards the close of the day's trading session, most of the benchmark indices managed to post gains and end the year on a high.

Wednesday's trading session was similar to the previous (Tuesday) session in more ways than one. During both the sessions, the indices opened strongly and quickly climbed to intra-day highs. However, the rest of the session, during both days, witnessed extremely volatile trading, with the sudden setting in of profit booking nearly wiping out all the previous gains.

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Profit-booking, which began during the last couple of hours of trading on Wednesday, threatened to shave off most of the session's gains. However, the re-emergence of buying support and then a further round of selective selling ensured that the indices had a rough ride through all of the last two hours. With institutional support in select pivotals picking up towards the end of the session, the indices managed to close on the positive side after posting a near 1 per cent gain.

Right through the session on Wednesday, the Bombay Stock Exchange's Sensitive Index (Sensex) stayed above the previous close level of 5791.85 points. After opening the session, the Sensex touched an intra-day high of 5876.55 points and a low of 5801.52 points, before closing at 5838.96 points, a rise of 0.81 per cent.

With this close of the Sensex, the widely tracked 30-share index has gone up by 2461 points or a whopping 72.89 per cent over the year-ago close level of 3377.28 points. From its month-ago close, the index is up 15.74 per cent and nearly 3.5 per cent over its corresponding close a week ago. At the current close of 5838.96 points, the Sensex is just about 312 points lower than the all-time high close of 6150.69 points reached on February 14, 2000.

On the BSE, a total of 20.9 crore shares were traded and represented a total turnover of Rs 2,543.26 crore. A total of 7,368 shares were listed on the BSE as on December 31, 2003. The total market capitalisation of all the Sensex stocks stood at Rs 3,13,105 crore.

Amongst Sensex stocks, Reliance Industries, which has a high, over 14 per cent weightage in the index, was up over Rs 12 and closed at Rs 573 on Wednesday. After this jump in the stock's price, the company's market capitalisation crossed the Rs 44,000-crore mark.

The other stocks that posted gains from among the Sensex stocks were Infosys Technologies, ITC Ltd, Ranbaxy Laboratories (up 1 per cent), State Bank of India (up nearly 2 per cent), Tata Iron and Steel (up 3.6 per cent), Hindalco, L&T, Satyam Computers, Tata Motors, ONGC, Cipla (up 3.44 per cent), Tata Power, ACC, Gujarat Ambuja Cements and BSES Ltd.

The losers amongst Sensex stocks were Hindustan Lever, ICICI Bank, HDFC, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Wipro, Bajaj Auto, HPCL, Grasim Industries, Hero Honda, Bharti Tele Ventures and Zee Telefilms.

On the National Stock Exchange, the S&P CNX Nifty index was up 0.35 per cent at 1879.75 points. The major Nifty gainers that did not feature in the BSE Sensex were Mahindra and Mahindra, ABB, HCL Technologies and National Aluminium.

Amongst the Nifty losers were Indian Hotels (down 3.72 per cent), Glaxo Pharma (down 3.39 per cent), Sun Pharmaceuticals, GSK Consumer Healthcare, VSNL and Wipro. The most active scrips on the NSE were Reliance, Tata Steel, Satyam Computers, GAIL India, State Bank of India, Tata Motors, Steel Authority of India, Infosys and Punjab National Bank.