Sensex outperforms global peers, ends 325 pts up

Mumbai: Indian equity benchmarks outperformed global peers on the first trading day of the week, surging 2 per cent on short covering and buying interest from foreign institutional investors.

The rally of close to 800 points since Friday can be attributed to upcoming results for the second quarter of FY12. The 30-share BSE Sensex climbed 324.69 points, to close at 16,557.23 and the 50-share NSE Nifty jumped 91.55 points, to end at 4,979.60.

Aditya Agarwal, Senior Derivative Analyst at Way2Wealth said short covering in some of the largecap stocks has fueled this rally.

"We still don’t think that the Nifty is out of the wood. 5000-5030 is still a very strong resistance level. We have seen lot of call writing at 5000 strike. In the last two rallies, we have not seen any unwinding of call option at 5000 strike. So this clearly indicates that players believe that 5000 will act as a very strong resistance level and we can see some supply from those levels," he reasoned.

Oil & gas, technology (ahead of Infosys' results on Wednesday), power, banks, realty, metal, telecom and Tata group's stocks were the leading drivers of today's upmove. The BSE Realty, IT, Oil & Gas, Auto and Power indices jumped 2-3 per cent.

Heavyweights Reliance Industries, Infosys, BHEL and ONGC shot up over 3.3 per cent. HDFC, ICICI Bank, TCS, Bharti Airtel, Bajaj Auto and NTPC gained 2-3 per cent.

Tata Motors maintained its top position on the buying list with a surge of 7.4 per cent on BSE. Tata Steel rose 3.25 per cent and Tata Power rallied 5.4 per cent.

DLF and Wipro climbed over 4.4 per cent. Coal India, which added in Nifty 50 from today, gained 1.7 per cent.

However, Maruti Suzuki plunged 3.6 per cent on the back of labour issues at its Manesar plant. L&T, Cipla, JSPL and Sun Pharma declined 0.5-1.4 per cent.

On the global front, European markets like France's CAC, Germany's DAX and Britain's FTSE were trading 0.5-1 per cent higher, at the time closing of Indian equities. The Dow Jones futures gained 137 points.

Market breadth was in favour of advances as the broader indices rose 1 per cent. About 1721 shares advanced as against 1097 shares declined on BSE.

Total traded turnover on both exchanges was more than Rs 1.14 lakh crore.