The Hindu : Stocks stage recovery, Sensex up 36 points

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 25, 2004

Business

Business

Stocks stage recovery, Sensex up 36 points

MUMBAI, FEB. 24. The market cut-short the four-session losing streak and staged a moderate recovery and gained 36 points at close in volatile activity on the Bombay Stock Exchange today on emergence of buying by foreign institutional investors. The BSE benchmark 30-share index that had lost 338 points in the last four sessions, opened weak at 5686.81 and later dipped to the intra-day low of 5606.84. It recovered smartly after midsession and ended at 5734.44 against 5698.04, netting a gain of 36.40 points.

Attributing the turnaround to fairly heavy buying after early pressure, brokers said retailers and operators seemed to have covered short positions in derivatives ahead of expiry of February contract on Thursday, after all round sell-off in the past few sessions. Retailers have been heavy sellers earlier to enable them to generate funds to subscribe to key public offers by the government to sell its stake in some of the large companies. The FIIs who remained the main driver of the market and have made net investments of Rs. 1,429 crores last week, reportedly were net buyers in a number of blue chip counters. The broad-based BSE-100 index also improved by 15.19 points to 2961.07.

Key counters such as Bajaj Auto, L&T, Hero Honda, ITC, Dr. Reddy's Lab, Tisco, MTNL, HPCL, SBI and RIL scored impressive gains on heavy buying support. However, Infosys Technologies, HDFC, BHEL, ICICI Bank, Zee Tele and Grasim finished with losses.

In the specified group, 112, including 19 index-based counters registered remarkable gains while 82 others closed with losses. The BSE-200 and the Dollex-200 were quoted up at 733.97 and 269.81 against 730.65 and 268.59 respectively. The BSE-500 edged up to 2254.65 from 2245.45 and the Dollex-30 to 1039.52 from 1032.92. The volume of business rose substantially to Rs. 2,890.72 crores from Rs. 2,265.70 crores yesterday. — PTI

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