Sentiment remains bullish at D-Street; Oil & Gas space leads

The sentiment at D-street remains bullish as investors continue to line up for equities amidst mixed Asian counterparts. Amidst across the board-buying, Oil & Gas, Consumer Durable and Health Care counters, are mainly fuelling the uptrend at D-street. Rally of shares of Reliance Industries (RIL), operator of the world’s largest oil refining complex, on discovery of a new natural gas deposit in its biggest block off India’s east coast, has spurted gains across the Oil & Gas pivotal.  Near day’s high, benchmark 30-share index, Sensex and widely followed index, Nifty, gaining over 0.75%, are comfortably cruising past 19,850 and 6,000 levels respectively. Meanwhile, broader indices’ gains were lesser in comparison to frontline indices. Only stocks from Auto counter currently bucking the trend have emerged as underperformers. However, the market could turn volatile going forward on account of a May series F&O expiry. On the global front, Asian stocks were trading mixed on Monday as China signaled it will tolerate slower growth and a stronger yen weakened the profit outlook for Japanese exporters.  

Closer home, the BSE Sensex is currently trading at 19,871.68, up by 167.35 points or 0.85% after trading in a range of 19,882.56 and 19,678.31. There were 19 stocks advancing against 9 declines, while one stock remains unchanged on the index. The overall market breadth on BSE is in favour of advances which have outpaced advances in the ratio of 1086:816; while 124 shares remain unchanged.

The broader indices too were trading with firm foot; the BSE Mid cap and Small cap index were trading up by 0.76% and 0.67% respectively.

The top gaining sectoral indices on the BSE were, Oil & Gas up by 1.88%, Consumer Durables up by 1.31%, Health Care up by 1.18%, Teck up by 1.10% and IT up by 0.84%, while Auto down 0.60% was the only loser on the sectoral index.

The top gainers on the Sensex were RIL up by 4.13%, Bharti Airtel up by 3.26%, Sun Pharma up by 3.12%, Dr Reddys Lab up by 1.65% and HDFC Bank up by 1.56%.

On the flip side, Bajaj Auto down by 2.55%, Mahindra & Mahindra down by 2.19%, Maruti Suzuki down by 1.46%, Cipla was down by 1.22% and ONGC down by 0.72% were the top losers on the Sensex.

Meanwhile, expressing confidence that sagging economic growth will revive soon, Finance Minister P Chidambaram said, in the current fiscal, domestic economy will grow by at least one percent more than the last fiscal growth of around 5 percent. Whereas, the FY15 growth will be a percentage point higher than the current fiscal and will soon touch the potential growth rate of 8 percent, he added.

For achieving the exponential growth, as against normal growth Chidambaram stressed that financial sector regulators, institutions and supervisors will have to gear up for the challenges posed for accelerating growth. By adding further, he said that institutions such as income tax and customs departments will have to enlarge their scale of operations to manage the size.

Referring to the banking sector, Chidambaram said, banks should differentiate the business cycle-affected honest defaulters from others and asked not to abandon the latter group. He also articulated the need for multi-tasking skills mainly by bank’s senior level officers to provide better service to customers.   

The CNX Nifty is currently trading at 6,029.20, up by 45.65 points or 0.76% after trading in a range of 6,033.65 and 5,975.55. There were 31 stocks advancing against 18 declines, while one stock remains unchanged on the index.

The top gainers of the Nifty were Reliance Industries up by 4.37%, Bharti Airtel up by 3.63%, Sun Pharmaceuticals up by 3.14% IndusInd Bank up by 3.08% and HDFC Bank up by 1.65%.

On the flip side, Lupin down by 2.42%, Bajaj-Auto down by 2.34%, M&M down by 2.15%, Maruti Suzuki down by 1.93% and Bank of Baroda down by 1.37% were the major losers on the index.

Most of the Asian equity indices were trading in green; Shanghai Composite rose 0.10%, Hang Seng increased 0.06%, Straits Times added 0.04%, KOSPI Composite surged 0.33% and Taiwan Weighted was up by 0.86%.

On the flip side, Jakarta Composite declined 1.46%, KLSE Composite slipped 0.27% and Nikkei 225 was down by 3.22%.