COMMENTARY
INTERVIEWS
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Sensex creates history by crossing 5,000

The Sensex had posted a 265-point gain yesterday when it had closed at 4963.10 points.

"This is the happiest moment on the stock market," said BSE president Anand Rathi.

After opening on a bullish note, share prices lost their initial gains, but closed higher than their previous levels in spite of today being the last day of the weekly trading settlement.

Reflecting the trend, the 30-scrip BSE Sensex opened at 5005.93 points, 43 points higher than yesterday's close, touched a new intra-day high of 5091.24 points, fell sharply to a low of 4942.24 -- an intra-day drop of 149.67 points -- before closing at 4981.74, a net gain of 18.64 points.

The stability at the Centre and Moody's upgrading the outlook from stable to positive for India's Ba2 rating on foreign and commercial debt, which have lifted the market sentiment, also helped to bring cheer with a heavy buying spree by foreign funds in several counters, dealers said.

This is also the first time after the 1992 securities scandal that the market has witnessed such a bull run on the country's premier bourse.

The broad-based BSE-100 index rose 16.15 points to 2329.51 points. Yesterday it had closed at 2313.36 points.

The information technology shares continued to be in the limelight while a few of the heavyweights like Hindustan Lever and Zee Telefilms declined from their high levels following profit booking by domestic institutional investors, dealers said.

Foreign institutional investors were net buyers over the last two days. According to figures released by the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the net FII investment on the bourses during the period October 1-8 stood at Rs 518 million.

Commenting on the change of mood in the market, leading broker and former BSE president M G Damani said the present rally is based on the revival of the Indian economy and the firm trend is certainly sustainable.

Brokers at the BSE observed good buying interest from retail investors. Some even said the firm trend was sustained only because of their buying support.

Domestic institutional investors reportedly sold a large amount of shares at the heavy-weighted counters while the FIIs continued their buying spree in fundamentally strong counters.

According to dealers, NIIT, Ranbaxy, TELCO and TISCO made impressive gains during the day.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices closed higher by 4.28 and 1.92 points at 538.04 and 206.02 points, respectively.

The BSE-500 index also moved up 15.07 points to 1602.15 points.

The BSE also recorded its highest turnover of Rs 36.092 billion today.

Ranbaxy Laboratories topped the turnover list with Rs 3.9094 billion, followed by Satyam Computers (Rs 2.7446 billion), Zee Telefilms (Rs 2.6289 billion), Reliance (Rs 2.1659 billion) and Infosys Technologies (Rs 2.1209 billion).

The Sensex, which was ruling below 3,000 at the beginning of the year, has posted a phenomenal increase of 2069 points during the year.

The total market capitalisation at the BSE registered a whopping increase of Rs 3.597 trillion to Rs 8.125 trillion on October 7 as against the market cap of Rs 4.528 trillion in October 1998.

The total market capitalisation at the National Stock Exchange, the country's largest exchange, also reported an increase of Rs 3.010 trillion yesterday to Rs 7.156 trillion from Rs 4.146 trillion recorded on October 7, 1998.

The current rally on the stock markets has also broken a tradition of the bourses which never saw a bull run in the July-December half since 1994. Analysts said that every year so far, the market fell around this time. Since 1994, the returns during July-December have been negative.

But now leading foreign brokerage houses have predicted that the Sensex may cross 6000 points by March 2000.

UNI

Business news