Buy stocks that are cheap now

Mumbai: Even as everyone was anticipating the market to continue its forward march and sail past the 12000 mark, it lost 367 points under heavy selling pressure and ended the day in red at 11550.

The advance decline ratio was in favour of decline with 1667 shares declining as against only 741 shares, which advanced. Hindalco, Tata Steel, HLL, Reliance Energy, VSNL, Hindalco, Tata Power and Nalco were some of the major losers on the Sensex.

Following this correction, which stocks appear cheap now and where can an investor deploy his funds?

Jagdish Malkani of NSE says that cement as a sector is definitely attractive; hotels are doing extremely well. “One can see that even in this carnage stocks like East India Hotels, Hotel Leela are doing well. So that is good.”

Even though the metals stocks have got a severe thrashing in Monday’s trade, Malkani is not willing to bet on them. “I would be wary about metals, but they are coming down to attractive levels, if at all I will look at Hindalco, Tata Steel,” he says.

Sumit Rohra of Antique Stock Broking chooses Reliance as his top pick. He calls it as an exciting story at this point of time. It has unveiled its retail plans, as per which it will be rolling out some stores on September 28. Following which, it will not remain only a petro play.

His other picks are HPCL, BPCL and IOC, which he thinks will benefit out of the falling crude prices. However, he asks to stay away from metals.

Rohra feels that auto stocks should also gain from the fall in crude and metal prices. Last but not the least are the hotel stocks. He asks people to keep an eye over them as India has been upgraded as the fourth best tourist destination.

Mihir Kothari of Motilal Oswal Securities says that the oil marketing space or the PSU banking space, which have been huge disappointment in terms of performance over the last four-five quarters are still showing some resilience in this fall.

Hence he suggests looking at spaces, which are showing relative strength like banking, oil stocks, Hero Honda.

"These are very good opportunities to build positions where the market is soft," he says.

He also has recommendations on Bombay Dyeing. However, it is not as a textile play but more as a real estate play.