Markets rebound from intra-day lows
Bharti Airtel, L&T lead gains on the Sensex
Markets rebounded from their intra-day lows touching fresh intra-day highs, amid a knee jerk reaction to the Reserve Bank of India's neutral stance on key policy rates, led by gains in Bharti Airtel and engineering major Larsen and Toubro.
The RBI kept the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR), Repo rate and SLR unchanged. Repo rate was unchanged at 8%. CRR has been kept unchanged at 4.25%. Reverse Repo Rates has been kept unchanged at 7%.
At 1:12PM, Sensex was up 75 points at 19,320 after touching a fresh intra-day high of 19,379.23 and the 50-share Nifty was up 23 points at 5,881 after hitting an intra-day high of 5,896.80.
Asian shares firmed up on hopes of talks in the US to avoid the fiscal cliff and the Nikkei extending gains from Monday. The Nikkei ended up 1% while the Shanghai Composite and Straits Times were marginally up. However, the Hang Seng was down 0.3%.
Among the sectoral indices on the BSE, Metal, Capital Goods, Power and Consumer Durables were among the top gainers up between 1.1-1.8% each.
Bharti Airtel was up 3.6% after the stock recently corrected following the luke warm response from retail investors for the 4,500-crore public issue of it tower arm Bharti Infratel.
In the capital goods space, L&T was up 1.3% and BHEL was up nearly 3% after the stock recently corrected from Rs 340 levels.
Metal shares firmed up after a preliminary version of HSBC's China manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI) hit a 14-month high in December 2012. In the metal segment, Tata Steel, Jindal Steel and Hindalco were up 1.8-2.6% each.
Among other Sensex gainers, mortgage lender HDFC was up 0.8% on buying at lower levels while auto major Tata Motors was up 1.4% at Rs 298.
The broader markets on the BSE, the Mid-cap and Small-cap indices were trading marginally higher up 0.1-0.3% each.
Market breadth was positive with 1,380 gainers and 1,290 losers on the BSE.