Festive consumer data pumps stock markets
By S Jha
New Delhi, October 31: After one and a half months, Nifty scaled past 18,000 level on Monday as bulls came charging on Dalal Street. The foreign institutional investors also stepped up their bets on the Indian equity markets, pumping in net Rs 4178 crores.
The Raisina Hills had on Sunday evening analysed the festive season consumer data about sales of cars, two-wheelers and housing units to note that the stock markets could see fireworks. The news that the Reserve Bank of India wouldn’t be resorting to hiking the interest rates also acted as icing on the cake.
Sensex climbed by 786 points, and Nifty gained 225 points. Nifty had the level of 18070 on September 13, which will be a psychological barrier for the range expansion. It may be noted that the traders have for a long time been betting on 16800-18600 range for Nifty. Thus, Nifty has entered in the higher zone.
HDFC twins – HDFC Bank and HDFC – were trending on the bourses. Whenever, this twins trend, the indices also go trending, as was seen in the Monday session. The auto sector predictably led the morning rally with the likes of Maruti, Mahindra and Mahindra, Eicher Motors trending in the early hours. The IT stocks too opened strong. They have been clearly out of favour this year on the bourses in line with the tech rout on NASDAQ. The cement stocks gained strongly. The pharma sector, which had broken out last month from a tight range, also did well. Sun Pharma led the pack among the pharmaceutical companies on the bourses.
The government also released the revenue and expenditure data for September, which showed robust growth in the direct tax collections. The data suggested that the government is comfortably placed to manage the fiscal deficit with strong direct tax collections. The IIP data also came after the market hours at a healthy 7.9 per cent.
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