After three straight days of selling pressure, the markets picked up speed on Thursday. Both the Sensex and the Nifty 50 finished the day with small gains, thanks to stocks in banking, capital goods, and consumer durables. Also, a lot of people bought Tata Motors, which helped the market go up. Investors aren’t sure how they feel about Q4 earnings, and global trends haven’t been helpful. This is because investors aren’t sure whether to expect more rate hikes or weak US earnings.
Sensex ended the day at 59,632.35 up 64.55 points, or 0.11 percent. Nifty 50 went up a little bit, ending at 17,624.45. Bank Nifty went up by 116 points, and BSE Bankex went up by more than 109 points.
With a drop of more than 188 points on BSE, healthcare stocks were the worst performers. While the IT gauge kept going down before HCL Tech’s Q4 earnings report. On BSE, the Capital Goods index went up by 206 points and the Consumer Durables index went up by 170 points.
Tata Motors was the top gainer on the Sensex, going up 1.7%, followed by NTPC and Asian Paints, which went up more than 1.3% and 1.2%, respectively. Stocks like Bharti Airtel, SBI, Tech Mahindra, L&T, Wipro, IndusInd Bank, and TCS rose between 0.5% and 1%.
On the other hand, HUL was the worst performer on the Sensex, falling 1.2%. Sun Pharma, Infosys, Ultratech Cements, Bajaj Finance, Nestle, and Axis Bank were the next worst performers.
Vinod Nair, the head of research at Geojit Financial Services, said, “The market is paying attention to the Q4 earnings season, which is going on now. It has a negative bias because the first findings were worse than expected, especially in the IT sector. The world market hasn’t been very good because people think there will be another rate hike and because earnings in the US have been mixed. Given the careful mood around the world, FIIs’ withdrawals this week have hurt the market trend.”
Also, on the foreign exchange market, the rupee stopped falling for three days and went up a little bit against the US dollar as Asian currencies went up against the buck before US data and the Fed’s comments. Also, the price of crude oil went down, which helped the rupee even more. In the end, the local unit was worth 82.1475 dollars per dollar. In the last session, it was worth 82.2250 dollars per dollar.
“Rupee traded positive above 82.16 between 82.24 to 82.15 on back of dollar index trading soft below 101.70$ along with weakness in crude as WTI traded below 78$,” said Jateen Trivedi, VP Research Analyst at LKP Securities.
In local stocks, going forward, Ajit Mishra, Vice President of Technical Research at Religare Broking, said, “We are still optimistic about the markets and recommend continuing to “buy on drops” until Nifty is able to stay above 17,400.” If the market closed decisively above 17,800, the trend would pick up again. During the corrective move, the focus should be on buying quality stocks from sectors that are showing relatively better strength.
For the Friday session, Rohan Shah, the head technical analyst at Stoxbox, stated that “Intraday traders can look for long opportunities only above 17,710 if the closing comes above 17,710 in a 15 min chart. Traders can only look for new shorts if Nifty falls below 17,570 and stays there for 15 minutes.
Trivedi said that the local currency, the rupee, is still in a wide range between 81.80 and 82.25, which is based on the likelihood that the interest rate will go up by 0.25bps in May. The range of the rupee can stay between 81.80 and 82.25.”
Also, Anindya Banerjee, VP of currency derivatives and interest rate derivatives at Kotak Securities, said, “In the near term, we expect volatility to increase as traders build positions ahead of the US Fed meeting in the first week of May. On spot, we see a range of 82.00 to 82.45.”
