The Hindu Business Line : Indices close with marginal losses

THE markets witnessed volatile trading on Tuesday. With the absence of a clear trend, the key indices fluctuated within a fairly large band of points. The volatility in the market was amply reflected in the near 100 points band within which the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index (BSE Sensex) oscillated during Tuesday's trading session.

Overnight news about Standard & Poor's, the international credit rating company, praising India's overall economic growth and external sector performance led to a surge in positive sentiment at the markets. The prospect of an improvement in the country's rating also lifted buying interest during the first hour of opening. The indices opened on a strong note. However, intense profit-booking right through the session pushed the indices down. Despite pockets of buying support emerging at various stages during the day, only the last bout of institutional support at the very end of the session managed to push up the indices to close day with marginal losses.

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The BSE Sensex opened Tuesday's session at 5,886 points and only managed to crawl up by about 11 points to 5,897 points towards the first two hours of the day's opening. However, sustained profit booking pulled the Sensex down to an intraday low of about 5,781 points. Only a jump in buying interest in a few key index stocks took the Sensex back towards the previous day's close. At the close of session on Tuesday, the index was at 5,822 points, down marginally by 15 points compared to the previous close of 5,838 points.

On the BSE, there were 22 stocks out of the 30 index constituents that closed Tuesday's session with losses. The remaining eight were trading in positive territory as at the close of session. Though information technology stocks were a mixed bag in terms of their performance, one of the top gainers from amongst the Sensex stocks was Infosys Technologies.

Infosys Technologies was up by about Rs 140 or 2.7 per cent at Rs 5,312. The other gainers were State Bank of India and Ranbaxy Laboratories (both up over 2 per cent), HDFC, Wipro and Bharti TeleVentures (both gained over 1 per cent), Cipla and Gujarat Ambuja Cements.

The pharmaceutical companies Ranbaxy Labs, Cipla and Matrix Labs seem to have closed higher on Tuesday after news came in about the possibility of sourcing cheap AIDS drugs from these companies as part of a UN and World Bank funded programme to get medical help to HIV positive patients in poor countries. The programme backed by the Bill Clinton Foundation plans to buy generic drugs from these companies for supplying the basket of daily dose drugs to patients at a low cost.

The major losers were ICICI Bank, HLL, L&T, Tata Motors, Tata Steel, HPCL, Satyam Computers, HDFC Bank, Grasim Industries, Bajaj Auto, Reliance Energy, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, BHEL, Hero Honda, ACC, MTNL, Tata Power and Zee Telefilms.

Reflecting the jump in prices of a few of the top infotech stocks, the BSE Teck index closed higher on Tuesday. The other major gainers from this sector were HCL Technologies, Polaris Labs, Hughes Software, E-Serve International and Mastek.

Other than the infotech and pharma sectors, the other major segment stocks that were in the limelight on Tuesday were from the banking industry. There were a few big gainers such as Corporation Bank that was up 4.78 per cent, but there were a lot of other banking stocks that also lost ground due to heavy profit booking.

At the National Stock Exchange (NSE), the 50-share Nifty index was down marginally by 0.29 per cent. The major gainers from amongst the Nifty stocks were Colgate, Sun Pharmaceuticals, Britannia Industries and Gail (India).