Tumultuous Trade

It was turbulent Monday on the bourses. The session kicked off in positive territory during the morning and early afternoon runs. However, the trend retracted towards the late session so much so that the bellwether Sensex wound up in negative zone.

HP-Compaq

The news of the giga-takeover of Compaq by printer giant Hewlett-Packard sent the stock of Digital Equipment (India) soaring on the bourses on Monday. Obviously the hope behind the ride was that this would translate into an open offer for its shareholders.

Digital is a 51 per cent subsidiary of Compaq. More than 26 lakh shares were traded on the BSE, the highest in a day in more than a month. Whether the open offer will come through is debatable, everything dpending on Sebi's takeover panel to which the mater has to be referred. Normally under this kind of a scenario an open offer is usually not required. Further, according to the market in case an open offer is made then considering the six-month average price it would come to around Rs 485 -- which would not offer much scope for arbitrage.

Infosys

Credit Lyonnais and Big Daddy were both heavily selling Infosys in the market today - with some experts having pegged the scrip price at below Rs 1000-levels by the end of the year this is being seen as some to reach that level at all costs. However another larger section of the market has rubbished the projections pointing out that the company's fundamentals cannot be ignored. "This is a mere temporary aberration," marketmen said, explaining that the scrip price at present had absolutely no relation to the company's working and it was in fact undervalued.

Weightage

Reliance Industries and Infosys Technologies have emerged with the highest portfolio weightage in percentage terms under the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (MSDW) - Model Portfolio for India.Both these companies account for 46.40 per cent of the total portfolio weight in percentage terms.

The MSDW model portfolio for India consists of 11 companies covering 8 sectors. The portfolio consists of 59.70 per cent of the MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) weightage.

The strategy report titled as 'start positioning for an industrial turnaround' written by Ridham Desai, India strategist and Ajay Kapur, regional strategist for equity research, Asia/Pacific.

Reliance Industries has been given the highest portfolio weightage of 23.30 per cent with a rating of outperformance while Infosys has been assigned the portfolio weightage of 23.10 per cent with a rating of outperformance - but volatile.