Select shares rally on FII buying

MUMBAI, JAN. 23. A smart rally in key heavyweight counters such as Zee Telefilms, Reliance Industries, Reliance Petroleum, SBI, L&T and MTNL provided the Sensex required strength to break the strong 4274-resistance in divergent trends on the Bombay Stock Exchange today on hectic buying by speculators as also selective purchases by foreign institutional investors.

The focussed price rally was so impressive that the Sensex could score the marked gains in spite of a noticeable setback in BHEL, Grasim, Hindalco, Infosys Technologies, ITC and Satyam Computer that have fairly good contribution in the BSE barometer.

Speculators were good buyers in old economy stocks on the back of fresh purchases by FIIs in L&T, RPL and few others.

Fresh buying by operators was attributed to short-covering on the National Stock Exchange which had the last day of current settlement. However, domestic mutual funds reportedly were busy in booking profits in several scrips, more particularly in IT sector, stocks of which had been in the limelight earlier.

The BSE sensitive index opened moderately up at 4277.83 and rallied past the 4300-mark to the day's high of 4321.75 before closing at 4296.69 against yesterday's close of 4267.11, netting a gain of 29.58 points. The BSE-100 index, however, eased by 2.01 points to 2196.24 from 2198.25.

Market sources foresee a strong upsurge that could push Sensex further up by about 180 points if it remained above the level of 4270 in the next couple of days. The Sensex has gained by about 270 points in the last eight sessions, largely because of increasing FII activity.

In the specified group, 52 counters including 16 index based shares registered sharp to moderate gains while 88 others finished with losses.

The BSE-200 and the Dollex were quoted down at 471.54 and 169.38 against 472.23 and 169.48 respectively. The BSE-500 moved down by 3.17 points to 1401.02 from 1404.19.

Satyam computer clocked the highest turnover of Rs. 758.80 crores followed by Zee Telefilms (Rs. 752.67 crores), Himachal Futuristic (Rs. 606.48 crores), Global Telesystem (Rs. 439.23 crores) and Reliance Industries (Rs. 411.18 crores).

- PTI

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