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Santa Claus brings cheer, buying binge to BSE; Sensex soars 91 points, 3054.73

The BSE Sensex zoomed up 91 points, crossing the psychological barrier of 3000 points with share prices staging a smart rally at the Bombay Stock Exchange, when the market opened after a Christmas holiday today.

According to leading BSE brokers, foreign institutional investors made heavy purchases in software counters like Pentafour Software, Satyam Computers and ITC. Scrips of Tata companies were also in limelight, they said and added that the speculators and domestic funds too joined them and made purchases in select scrips.

Reflecting the bullish phase, the 30-scrip BSE Sensex opened above the 3000-mark at 3007.68 points, touched the day's high of 3068.13 before closing at 3054.73 points, showing a net gain of 91.28 as against Thursday's close of 2963.45 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 index rose by 42.87 points to 1356.92 points from the previous close of 1314.05 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices advanced by 9.42 and 3.71 points to 313.12 and 122.61 points from the previous close of 303.80 and 118.90 points respectively.

According to analysts, a lot of scrips reported eight per cent gain and hit their price bands.

Among them were Voltas, Pentafour Software, ITC Bhadrachalam, Ashok Leyland, Arvind Mills, Blue Star, Bharat Earth Movers, Ballarpur Industries, BPL, Videocon International, Century Enka, CMC, GAIL, Gramophone India, Herberstons, Hindistan Construction, Hitech Drilling, Kirloskar Cummins, Lakme, Mastek, Petron Engineering, Punjab Wireless, Silverline, Titan and Tata Telcom.

Besides these scrips, Tata's other scrips like Telco, Tisco were also turned out gainers, dealers said.

The pharma scrips, however, turned weak. Novartis which was showing continuous gain for the last couple of weeks, registered moderate losses, others like Glaxo, Rhone, Pfizer, Burrough Welcome also declined considerably, dealers said.

UNI

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