Mumbai. Nifty touched its highest level on Wednesday, while Sensex remained slightly away from its record level, due to buying in power, capital goods and industrial stocks in the domestic market amid signs of strength at the global level. Traders said that the buying trend in the shares of select companies like HDFC Bank and Reliance Industries also strengthened investor sentiment and both the indices closed with a slight gain.
In a highly volatile trade, the BSE benchmark Sensex rose 149.98 points or 0.20 per cent to close at 76,606.57. At one point during the day, it rose 593.94 points or 0.77 per cent to reach 77,050.53, which is only 28.51 points away from its all-time high of 77,079.04. The National Stock Exchange (NSE) index Nifty also rose 177.1 points or 0.76 per cent to reach a new high of 23,441.95 during the day’s trading. At the end of trading, it closed at a new high of 23,322.95 with a gain of 58.10 points or 0.25 per cent.
Nagaraj Shetti, Senior Technical Research Analyst at HDFC Securities, said, “After the market opened on a positive note, there was a rise for a large part of the session. However, the decline during the trading session was used as an opportunity for buying.” Among the Sensex companies, Power Grid’s stock registered the highest rise of 2.54 percent. Apart from this, Tech Mahindra, Bajaj Finance, NTPC, UltraTech Cement, Larsen & Toubro, Tata Steel, Bharti Airtel, Bajaj Finserv and HCL Technologies also closed with gains.
On the contrary, shares of Mahindra & Mahindra, Hindustan Unilever, Infosys and Titan closed with a decline. In the broader market, the BSE Midcap index rose 1.07 percent, while Smallcap rose 1.06 percent. Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services, said, “The global markets remained largely positive before the US inflation data and the results of the monetary committee meeting came out. At the domestic level, the market is moving towards new heights due to expectations related to the upcoming budget.” In other Asian markets, South Korea’s Kospi and China’s Shanghai Composite remained on the rise, while Japan’s Nikkei and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng closed down.
European markets were trading mostly higher in the afternoon session. US markets were trading higher on Tuesday.
Global oil benchmark Brent crude rose 1.16 percent to $82.87 per barrel. According to stock market data, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) made a net sale of shares worth Rs 111.04 crore on Tuesday. On Tuesday, the BSE Sensex fell 33.49 points to close at 76,456.59. However, the Nifty closed with a marginal gain of 5.65 points at 23,264.85.