Markets end on a sedate note

It has been another volatile session on the bourses as the bulls and bears battled for supremacy. The key benchmark indices surged in early trade on the back of strong Asian markets and a surprise bonus announcement by Reliance Industries after a gap of 12 years.

The petrochemical major, however, pared most of its gains in the very first hour of trade and this had a spiralling effect on the overall markets. 

The indices dipped into negative territory at one point. But buying in FMCG and energy stocks came to the resue. And the healthy inflation data added to the momentum. Inflation dipped marginally to 0.7 per cent after a gap of almost two months.

Bears had not given up hope though. Profit booking emerged towards the end of trade and the markets finally closed around yesterday's levels. 

The Sensex ended at 16,843, higher by 36 points and the Nifty closed at 5002, up 36 points. And Reliance with a gain of 1% at Rs 2,119 as against its intra-day high of Rs 2,209 on the BSE.

Telecom stocks again took it on the chin and IT stocks had a bad outing on the back of a strong rupee.  Bharti and Reliance Communications lost between 6-7%, while TCS and Infosys shed 3-4% each on the NSE. Infosys weakened almost 2% ahead of its results tomorrow. However, stocks such as Siemens, Tata Motors and Reliance Infrastructure did well, gaining between 4-5% on the NSE.

The market breadth was negative - out of 2,868 stocks traded on the BSE, 1,512 declined, 1,246 advanced today.

Reliance topped the combined value chart on the BSE and NSE with a turnover of Rs 2,041 crore followed by Bharti Airtel (Rs 1,701 crore), HDIL (Rs 860 crore), Unitech (Rs 737 crore) and ICICI Bank (Rs 665 crore).

Unitech led the volume chart with trades of around 74 million shares followed by Bharti Airtel (49.70 million), Ispat Industries (44.44 million), Suzlon (30.42 million) and Kingfisher Airlines (26.44 million).