Sensex ends 117 pts up; metals, banks support

Mumbai: The market managed to recover almost all its previous day's losses on Friday, supported by infrastructure, metals, banks, metals and telecom stocks. However, the fall in Reliance, HDFC and TCS limited the upside. The Sensex spiked to an intra-day high of 16,257.34, before closing up 117.11 points at 16,154.62. The Nifty gained 34.75 points to end at 4,866.

For the week, the BSE benchmark rose 1.8 per cent and Nifty jumped 2.35 per cent. Both had rallied more than 2 per cent last week as well.

Jyoti Vaswani, CIO and Director Fund Management, Aviva India feels it is sort of a technical pullback. "What is actually recovering this year, is all those stocks and sectors which were really beaten down last year. This is a phenomenon which is not restricted to India but it is also a global phenomenon," he explained.

But he doesn't think there has been such a transition that things have dramatically changed over last year as of now.

Technical Analyst, Sudarshan Sukhani of s2analytics.com feels that the market is going to see choppy movements.

Metal stocks rallied for the third consecutive session today; respective index shot up over 3 per cent. The rally could be after the cabinet secretary said Indonesia president ordered a review of all mining permits issued by local government. Indonesian govt imposed strict norms on Indian mines earlier.

Tata Steel topped the buying list, shooting up over 7 per cent. Coal India surged 5.56 per cent; Jindal Steel was up 3 per cent and Sterlite Industries gained 1.7 per cent.

Among banks, ICICI Bank, SBI and HDFC Bank were up 0.6-1 per cent. Capital goods majors L&T shot up nearly 4 per cent and BHEL rose 1.7 per cent.

Power stocks too charged up; NTPC rallied 3 per cent and Tata Power gained 1.8 per cent. Among others, ITC went up 1 per cent; Bharti and Wipro were up 2.5 per cent.

There was a mixed trend in auto stocks; Tata Motors and M&M moved up 1 per cent each while Bajaj Auto tanked 3 per cent; Maruti and Hero Motocorp were down 1-2 per cent.

Shares of Reliance Industries, HDFC and TCS dropped over 0.5 per cent.

The broader markets outperformed benchmarks - the BSE Midcap Index was up 1.1 per cent and Smallcap up 1.44 per cent.

Even the market breadth was strong; about two shares advanced for every share falling on the BSE.

On the global front, European markets too were trading higher. France's CAC, Germany's DAX and Britain's FTSE were up 0.2-0.9 per cent.