The Sensex opened almost flat at 9,710 - down five points. After an upmove in initial trades, the index soon slipped into red to a low of 9,633. Fresh buying at lower levels, mainly in banking and realty stocks, helped the index recover its losses and rebound into the positive zone.

A sharp fall in headline inflation numbers, coupled with expectations of the second stimulus package to announced in the near term, boosted the market sentiment.

Agressive buying towards the close saw the index rally to a high of 10,110 - up 477 points from the day's low.

The Sensex finally ended with a gain of 361 points at 10,076.

The NSE Nifty ended at 3061, up 107 points.

The BSE Realty and Bankex rallied over 7% each to 2,284 and 5,620, respectively. The Power index surged nearly 6% to 1,845.

The market breadth was fairly positive - out of 2,547 stocks traded, 1,490 advanced, 966 declined and 91 were unchanged on Thursday.

INDEX MOVERS...

DLF, Jaiprakash Associates [Get Quote] and Reliance Infrastructure zoomed around 9.5% each to Rs 277, Rs 84 and Rs 600, respectively.

ICICI Bank [Get Quote] soared over 9% to Rs 471. SBI [Get Quote] surged nearly 8% to Rs 1,296.

Satyam [Get Quote], Tata Motors [Get Quote], TCS [Get Quote] and BHEL rallied 7% each to Rs 169, Rs 174, Rs 510 and Rs 1,433, respectively.

HDFC Bank [Get Quote] advanced nearly 6% to Rs 1,060. NTPC and Maruti [Get Quote] moved up over 5% each to Rs 183 and Rs 536, respectively.

ITC gained 4.7% at Rs 180, and ACC added 4.5% to Rs 508.

MOST ACTIVE COUNTERS

Reliance topped the value chart with a turnover of Rs 469.10 crore followed by HDIL (Rs 249.25 crore), SBI (Rs 234.70 crore), Satyam (Rs 229.60 crore) and DLF (Rs 190 crore).

Reliance Natural Resources [Get Quote] led the volume chart with trades of around 3.50 crore shares followed by Suzlon [Get Quote] (2.68 crore), Unitech (2.41 crore), GVK Power (1.96 crore) and HDIL (1.70 crore).