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As FIIs, FIs take a breather, operators power Sensex up 84 points to 4729.78

Equities posted impressive gains on speculative buying support extended by domestic operators on the first day of the current trading cycle, allowing the Sensex of the Bombay Stock Exchange to surge by 84 points today.

Mirroring the bullish trend, the BSE-30 Sensitive Index opened at 4713.34, witnessed a high of 4766.79, low of 4713.34 and ended at 4729.78, showing a net gain of 83.97 points or 1.80 per cent. ''There was heavy speculative buying in a broad-range of scrips."

The foreign institutional investors and domestic financial institutions had a nominal presence. Of course, there was some FII buying in index-based scrips. "But the local institutions were engaged in booking profits at peak levels,'' a leading broker said.

Tata companies fared well with Tisco and Telco touching the upper- circuit-filter at Rs 157 and Rs 307 respectively.

Software stocks remained favourites. Infosys Technologies rose by Rs 60 to Rs 5,500, Pentafour Software by Rs 14 to Rs 642 and Satyam Computers by Rs 28 to Rs 925.

Reliance rose by Rs 12 to Rs 188, while Hindustan Lever and Ranbaxy rose by Rs 10 and Rs 2 to Rs 1,050.

A few policy measures taken by the Reserve Bank of India in support of the rupee had a positive impact on the market during the day.

The BSE-100 index rose by 47.17 points to end at 2137.03 as against the last close of 2089.86. The BSE-200 and Dollex indices rose by 11.38 and 4.48 points to end at 492.28 and 188.33 respectively. The BSE-500 index ended 36.84 points higher at 1460.13.

Meanwhile, the S&P CNX Nifty ended 1.67 per cent higher at 1369.70, marking an increase of 22.40 points

The total turnover on the BOLT network of the exchange was Rs 22.81 billion from trading in 107.3 million shares.

Ranbaxy Labs recorded the highest volume of Rs 1.71 billion followed by Reliance (Rs 1.68 billion) and SBI (Rs 1.33 billion). Other scrips that recorded a high turnover were Zee Telefilms, Telco, Satyam Computers, Tata Tea, Pentafour Software, L&T, ITC, Digital Equipment, ACC, BSES, Tisco and Castrol Limited.

UNI

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