Nifty hovering around 6,700; oil shares up

Markets continued to trade firm in late noon trades led by Reliance Ind and ONGC

Markets continued to maintain their upward momentum led by oil and gas shares with index heavyweight Reliance Industries and ONGC rising nearly 3%.

At 2:30PM, the 30-share Sensex was up 79 points at 22,483 and the 50-share Nifty was up 15 points at 6,710.

The rupee was trading tad higher at 60.14 compared with its previous close of 60.16 on Friday, tracking weakness in the dollar against other Asian currenciess coupled with gains in domestic equity markets.

Asian markets were trading lower after a private survey indicated that China's manufacturing data in April came in lower than expected. China's April PMI for the manufacturing sector slipped to 48.1 against expectations of 48.3. However, as per official PMI released for the servives sector showed that April PMI edged up to 54.8 compared with 54.5 in March. Japanese markets were closed for trading today. Shanghai Composite recovered from the day's lows to end flat with positive bias. Hang Seng was down 1.3% and Straits Times eased 0.3%.

European markets were trading with marginal losses as investors turned cautious after weak manufacturing data from China while concerns over the crisis in Ukraine also dampened investor sentiment. UK markets were closed today. CAC-40 was down 0.3% and DAX was down 0.2%.

The BSE Oil & Gas index was the top gainer among the sectoral indices up 2.2%. According to technical analysts Reliance Ind and ONGC look good on the charts. Reliance Ind can be bought with a stop loss at Rs 925 and ONGC can be bought with a stop loss at Rs 330.

Metal shares also witnessed a rebound on value buying and shortcovering at lower after the recent correction in the past few sessions. The Metal Index was up nearly 2%. Hindaclo was up over 6% while Tata Steel , Sterlite were up 1.3-2.2% each.

ICICI Bank, L&T, ITC, TCS, Hindalco were among the other Sensex gainers.

IT major Infosys and mortgage lender HDFC were the top Sensex losers.

Among other shares, Ajanta Pharma surged 11% to Rs 1,087 after reporting over two-fold jump in standalone net profit at Rs 70 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2014 (Q4FY14), on back of higher revenues from export. The pharmaceutical company had profit of Rs 27 crore in the same quarter year ago.

The BSE Mid-cap index was up 0.2% and the Small-cap index was down 0.2%.

Market breadth was weak with 1,350 losers and 1,252 gainers on the BSE.