Markets consolidate gains

The markets continued to consolidate in morning trades; the Sensex was up 189 points at 18,211, while the Nifty scaled 40 points to touch 5,457.

Sustained buying in the Realty and Oil & Gas counters pushed up the benchmark, but the broader indices underperformed.

The BSE Mid-cap index gained 0.5% at 6,791, while the Small-cap moved up 0.8% at 8,420.

Top Sensex gainers were Sterlite Industries at Rs 170 and Bharti Airtel at Rs 325, both up slightly over 3%, DLF at Rs 227 and RIL at Rs 918, both up more than 2.5%, and Tata Motors at Rs 1,093, HUL at Rs 275 and TCS at Rs 1,172, all up 2%.

Losers on the Sensex were HDFC at Rs 628, Tata Steel at Rs 627, Tata Power at Rs 1,225, Maruti Suzuki at Rs 1,234 and Cipla at Rs 327, all down between 0.5%-0.7%. NTPC lost 0.4% at Rs 184, while HDFC Bank was down 0.3% at Rs 2,035.

BSE Realty led the gains on the sectoral chart, up 2.2% at 2,185, follwed by Oil & Gas at 9,470 up 2% and Teck and IT at 3,748 and 6,404 respectively, up 1.6% each.

Realty stocks topping the index were Unitech at Rs 45 up 4.4%, DLF at Rs 228 up 3.2% and HDIL up 2.6% at Rs 129.

THe Power index was the only index in the negative, down only 0.1% at 2,700. Losers in this space were Tata Power at Rs 1,225 down 0.6%, Torrent Power at Rs 226 down 0.5% and Siemens at Rs 844 down 0.4%.