Nifty facing resistance near 8,400 levels; L&T, Bharti Airtel up 1.5%

Gains were led by engineering major L&T while profit taking in IT majors capped upside gains

Benchmark share indices continued to trade with gains led by select index heavyweights while profit taking in IT majors capped upside gains. Meanwhile, markets could turn volatile ahead of the expiry of June derivative contracts on Thursday.

At 12:55PM, the 30-share Sensex was up 84 points at 27,814 and the 50-share Nifty was up 30 points at 8,384 after hitting an intra-day high of 8,398.45.

The broader markets also came off their day's highs and the BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices were trading with marginal gains.

Market breadth remained positive with 1,284 gainers 1,065 losers on the BSE.

The Indian rupee was trading marginally lower at 63.62 compared to the previous close of 63.72 after the dollar firmed up against other currencies overseas.

Further, foreign portfolio investors were net buyers to the tune of Rs 651 crore on Monday, as per provisional stock exchange data.

MONSOON TRENDS

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in its daily monsoon update issued yesterday, that the southwest monsoon has further advanced into some more parts of Gujarat region, Madhya Pradesh, most parts of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and some parts of Bihar.

GLOBAL MARKETS

Asian markets edged higher tracking positive developments overseas after Greece presented a new proposal to avoid debt default. Japan's Nikkei ended up 1.8% while China's Shanghai Composite was up over 2%. Hang Seng and Straits Times were up over 0.7% each.

European shares opened higher on hopes that the debt crisis in Greece would be resolved. The CAC-40 and DAX were up 0.8% each while FTSE-100 was trading with marginal gains.


SECTORS & STOCKS

Capital Goods was the top sectoral gainer up 1.4% followed by Metal, Oil and Gas indices. BSE IT index was down nearly 1% while Consumer Durables index was down 0.6%.

Engineering major L&T was up over 1.5%. The company will list its IT services arm L&T Infotech by December this year, Chairman A M Naik told CNBC TV18 on Tuesday.

FMCG major ITC was up 1.4% as the progress of the monsoon in most parts of the country would boost rural income and aid volume growth.

Bank shares such as HDFC, HDFC Bank, SBI extended gains and were up 0.6-1% each.

Reliance Industries staged a recovery and was up 0.5%. The stock had witnessed profit taking on Monday after gains of over 12% in the previous week.

Bharti Airtel was up 1.5%. Japan’s SoftBank said it would invest $20 billion along with Bharti Enterprises and Foxconn in setting up solar power parks in India. .

Banking shares mainly public sector undertakings (PSU) were trading higher by up to 5% on the bourses after the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the government will infuse capital in public sector banks in the next three to six months.

Union Bank, PNB, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank and SBI were up 0.8-4.7% each.

IT major Infosys was the top Sensex loser down over 2% while TCS eased 0.4%. Other Sensex losers include, Lupin and ICICI Bank among others.

Among other shares, shares of MBL Infrastructure were up over 2% at Rs 530 after the company announced that its board, at the Annual General Meeting of the company scheduled on July 17, 2015 will consider bonus share issue in the ratio of 1:1.