Benchmarks closed sharply higher Friday outperforming the global peers on expectations of a reformist budget next week. Traders took cues from the railway budget presented by Mamata Banerjee where the minister put thrust on infrastructure development without tweaking fares.
“The Railway budget is more reformist than populist. Rather than the giveaways in form of lower passenger tariffs, the focus is on productive utilisation of spare land and develop railway infrastructure under the public private participation model. No increase in freight tariffs is also positive for many core sectors like steel, cement etc,” said Gaurav Dua, head research, Sharekhan.
Indices opened lower in line with global markets and turned rangebound till the railway budget was tabled. Benchmarks picked momentum as sentiments turned bullish and traders didn’t want to end the week with negative positions.
Bombay Stock Exchanges’ Sensex closed at 14913.05 up 254.56 points or 1.74 per cent. The index touched a high of 14945.85 and low of 14499.74.
National Stock Exchange’s Nifty ended at 4424.25 up 75.40 points or 1.73 per cent. The broader index touched an intra-day high of 4434.45 and intra-day low of 4298.95.
“Expectations of people from the budget have gone up. They are expecting some kind of tax breaks, concession to industries and divestment to bridge fiscal deficit. There was a lot of short covering seen in the second half of the session. People are expecting tax exemptions and lower interest rates on housing loans. Sentiment was evident from the sharp rise in HDFC shares,” said Bharat Shah, Head Institutional Sales, Ventura Securities.
BSE Midcap Index was up 0.83 per cent and BSE Smallcap Index moved 0.43 per cent higher.
All the sectoral indices were in the green. BSE Bankex gained 2.19 per cent, BSE Capital Goods Index moved 1.90 per cent higher and BSE Power Index was up 1.84 per cent.
HDFC (7.74%), Tata Steel (4.32%), Mahindra&Mahindra (3.59%), Reliance Infrastructure (3.17%) and ICICI Bank (3.05%) were amongst the Sensex gainers.
Hero Honda (-1.08%), Hindalco (-0.95%), Sterlite Industries (-0.74%) , Reliance Communications (-0.24) and ITC (-0.03%) were amongst the losers.
Market breadth was positive on the BSE with 1341 advances and 1263 declines.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com
