Did D-Street traders have a whiff of Murthy's return?

About 24 mn shares of Infosys worth Rs 575 cr were traded on both the exchanges on Friday compared to a three-month daily average of 14.5 mn shares worth about Rs 365 cr

The spurt in activity in shares of Infosys on Friday, a day before the company announced the return of its co-founder N R Narayana Murthy as the executive chairman, has raised a few eyebrows. A theory doing the rounds on Dalal Street is that some traders might have got a whiff of the development in advance that drove up Infosys shares by as much as nine per cent on Monday.

About 24 million shares of Infosys worth Rs 575 crore were traded on both the major exchanges on Friday compared to a three-month daily average of 14.5 million shares worth about Rs 365 crore. The stock had advanced 2.7 per cent on Friday, when the benchmark Sensex fell 2.3 per cent and the BSE's IT index gained 0.4 per cent.

Brokers said the surge in volumes in Infosys shares of Friday was aided by a few large deals on the bourses in the last hour of the trading session.

"Going by the size of the trades (on Friday), it looked more like individual high networth traders' positions, rather an institutional positions," said a Mumbai-based broker. The size of these trades could not be ascertained.

So, if an investor bought 1,000 shares of Infosys on Friday at a volume-weighted average price of about Rs 2,383, he would have made a profit of about Rs 2.42 lakh if the shares were sold at the highest level of Rs 2,624.90 on Monday.

A section of the market believes it would be premature to conclude the spurt in volumes in Infosys on Friday was driven by trades of people in the know. Traders could have created fresh positions in Infosys shares after the expiry of the May series on Thursday, said a derivatives analyst with an institutional broker.

The decline in the rupee against the dollar could have prompted traders to take bullish bets on Infosys, which derives a major chunk of its revenues from the US.