COMMENTARY
INTERVIEWS
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Bears go on short covering; Sensex recovers 82 points, 3166.84

Blue-chip shares recovered moderately pushing the Sensex up by 81.67 points on renewed buying support from foreign institutional investors at the index-based counters on the Bombay Stock Exchange today.

The FIIs bought small lots of Telco shares at lower level despite the company's poor performance for the first quarter of financial year in the domestic market. Telco's sales in value terms has been increased in the international market.

The sharp rise in the heavy weighted shares in the Asian market improved the sentiment of FIIs and domestic institutional investors to invest in the capital market that reflected in Sensex, which witessed a continuous southward trend for last couple of days, leading brokers said.

Mirroring the upward trend, the BSE Sensitive Index shot up by 81.67 points to 3166.84 points as compared to previous close of 3085.17 points.

Leading brokers said that hectic buying was witnessed at the software counters. The Unit Trust of India, State Bank of India, General Insurance Corporation of India and Life Insurance Corporation of India also bought considerable number of heavy-weighted shares.

Being the last day of current settlement at the National Stock Exchange, bear operators have also made heavy short covering which also helped to push up their equity prices, brokers added.

The broad-based BSE National Index finished higher at 1397.74 points as compared to previous close of 1362.45 points showing a net gain of 34.29 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices also closed higher at 320.90 and 125.53 points registering an increase of 07.72 and 03.02 ' points as against yesterday's close of 313.18 and 122.51 points respec tively.

A statement made by the senior Congress leader Sharad Pawar pertaining to the stability of the government also strengthend confidence of market participants, brokers said. In an interview to a private TV channel, Pawar had ruled out any possibility of toppling the Bharatiya Janata Party government by the Congress in the present circumstances.

Satyam Computers recorded the day's highest turnover of Rs 2.83 billion out of a total turnover of Rs 11.61 billion (up Rs 2.39 billion to yesterday's Rs 8.12 billion).

Satyam was followed by ITC (Rs 2.11 billion), Pentafour Software (Rs 879.8 million), SBI (Rs 730.5 million), RIL (Rs 566.1 million).

Among other active scrips were Zee Telefilms (Rs 530.6 million), Infosys Technology (Rs 333.3 million), Telco (Rs 246.8 million), BHEL (Rs 235.7 million), Tata Tea (Rs 223.3 million), ACC (Rs 214.5 million), Castrol India (Rs 197.6 million), L&T (Rs 183.1 million), Digital Equipment (Rs 169.4 million) and MTNL (Rs 162.6 million) in specified counters.

At the B1 counter, there were good transactions for Silverline Industries (Rs 38.7 million), Wipro (Rs 34.5 million), HCL Infosys Technology (Rs 30.8 million), Sundaram Fasteners (Rs 19.5 million, Hoechst Mari (Rs 15.5 million), Bata India (Rs 13.4 million), Tata Infotec (Rs 13.3 million), Software Solutions (Rs 12.7 million), Kirloskar Oil Engineering (Rs 11.5 million), Graphite Industries (Rs 10.5 million), and DSQ Software (Rs 9.9 million).

UNI