The Hindu Business Line : Heavyweights lead broad-based rally

THE markets put up a strong show on Monday. As a continuation of Friday's rally, the BSE Sensex has gained 4.6 per cent and the S&P CNX Nifty gained 4.9 per cent.

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Opening lower by 18.21 points to 5649.30 points, the Sensex continued to rise unabatedly to close at 5823.17 points, up by 155.66 points. The Nifty gained about 52.40 points to close at 1852.70 points on Monday, after opening lower at 1798.35 points, down by 1.95 points.

Stocks such as Infosys, Reliance, Bharti Tele-Ventures, ITC and ICICI Bank ramped up the indices. On a day with gains, stocks that muddied the picture were HLL and Dr Reddy's. HLL, the index heavyweight, closed the day in the negative territory with marginal losses.

The market breadth was positive, with 1100 stocks gaining as against 771 stocks declining. Advances and declines were neck-to-neck in B2 and T category of stocks.

Bharti and Maruti were added to the S&P Nifty on Monday. Bharti gained 14.43 per cent to Rs 162.92 and Maruti rose by 2.90 per cent to Rs 514.55 on the NSE.

Dr Reddy's Laboratories fell by 18 per cent to Rs 1,015.2 on the backdrop of Pfizer of the US winning the case on its hypertension drug. Other pharma stocks, however, gained.

Ranbaxy Laboratories and Cipla rose by more than 1 per cent. The two stocks had, in fact, recovered from the lower levels after declining in early trades.

Buoyed by the ongoing IPO's, PSU stocks were the major gainers on Monday's trading. GAIL India was up by Rs 1.9 to Rs 204.05, CMC up by Rs 5.45 to Rs 567 and Dredging Corporation by Rs 14.2 to Rs 492.15. IPCL fell by 4.2 per cent to Rs 183.45 following news that the Government has fixed an offer price of Rs 170 per share for the sale of its residual equity.

Other gainers were PSU banks. Compared to these, private players had a quiet a number of losers. Notable among them were Global Trust Bank, IDBI Bank, IndusInd Bank, ING Vysya Bank, J&K Bank and UTI Bank.

Auto stocks were in the limelight with a few companies announcing their February sales figures. Major gainers on Monday were Hero Honda and TVS Motor. But a few auto ancillary stocks closed the day in the negative territory. Exide Industries, MICO, Sundaram Clayton and Ucal Fuel were a few to close with losses.

It was a rough day for the FMCG stocks. Led by the bellwether HLL, most stocks languished in the negative territory. Colgate and Dabur closed with losses, but Godrej Consumer bucked the trend to close with gain of about 2 per cent at Rs 188.95.

Steel stocks were affected by the Government's announcement on Saturday, in which it had reduced the excise duty on a majority of steel items, slashed the Customs duty on coal and pig iron and froze the Duty Entitlement Pass Book scheme for steel exports. Steel stocks such as Essar Steel, Ispat Industries, Jindal Iron, Jindal Steel and Steel Authority ended the day in the negative territory. But Tata Steel managed to gain more than one per cent and ended the day at Rs 435.95.

Reliance Energy was up by about 4 per cent to Rs 774.55. It touched new 52-week high of Rs 789.70, but came of it on selling pressure.

In the F&O segment on the NSE, volumes plunged to Rs 10,000-crore level. Volumes of the cash segment too were low at about Rs 4,000 crore as compared with more than Rs 5,000 crore levels witnessed in the last couple of days. Marked increase in volumes were in stocks of Jain Irrigation, Crompton Greaves, Jubilant Organosys, Apollo Tyres and Vardhman Acrylics.