Fastidious Fiis

The markets today witnessed selective buying by institutional investors. While overall the Sensex moved in the narrow range, it ended lower on selling pressure.

Foreign portfolio investors were heard buying 50,000 shares of pharma blue-chip Dr Reddy's Laboratories, while there was selling in Global Tele-Systems and Satyam Computer Services. Big Daddy was rumoured to have sold shares of DSQ and Pentamedia in loads.

Hero No 1

Hero Honda was a favoured stock today with Savvy Fund manger rumoured to have bought around 6 lakh shares.

According to market sources, Uncle Jam supplied the entire block, mostly in a synchronised deal.

Hero Honda has been zipping through with sales showing no signs of weakening even when competitors are increasing their efforts via new launches.

The counter has been abuzzing with talks of a share buyback. Hero Honda has a strong presence in rural areas and with a good monsoon, the expected increase in rural disposable income may perk up company's revenues, sources said.

Teaching surprises

Cross Bee was active at the NIIT counter. It is rumoured to have bought quite a noticeable chunk of shares.

This has surprised many market players as most of them are expecting a poor performance in the quarterly results to be announced shortly.

However, it seems that Cross Bee is excited about its strong brand value it has created in software training.

According to market players the expectation of revival in software after a couple of quarters, should do good even to software education.

However, the King Kong Bank Brokerage sold five lakh shares of NIIT today which is said to have been picked up by Cross Bee.

NIIT will announce its results on Thursday, and given the market indications the net profit for June quarter will be substantially lower than the analysts expectations.

June quarter is normally a better quarter for the company due to the seasonal nature of the training business and June being the month for new enrollments.

However, the company had given an indication earlier of a 30-40 per cent decline in net profits for the year.