The market rally continued for the third day on Monday with the Nifty closing just 23 points short of its resistance level of 2,800.
Technical analysts see the current surge as a minor uptrend within the large downtrend and, hence, the pullback should come to an end this week. They see the Sensex and the Nifty at 8,800-9,000 and 2,750-2,800 respectively.
Options traders were seen holding their short positions at 2,800 strike calls as the open interest (OI) in it decline by a modest 68,800 shares despite a trading volume of 11.76 million shares.
The support for Nifty on the basis of OI is seen at 2,700 as traders have added an OI of 1.13 million shares at 2,700 strike put options.
Siddhartha Bhamre, equity and derivative analyst with Angel Broking, expects the technical pullback to come to an end around 2,805, which is 61.8 per cent retracement of the recent fall in the Nifty from a high of 2,970 to 2,539. He indicates that the 2,800 zone is the appropriate area to create shorts as 2,800 strike calls hold the highest OI among call options.
The market is ready for the next and final leg of the fall that should see the indices test and break the October 2008 lows by the first week of April, says a technical analyst at JM Finance.
Futures and options (F&O) traders were on Monday seen building short positions in the next month series as the market saw a sharp increase in OI by almost 3 million shares in the Nifty April series.
More From This Section
The Nifty March futures witnessed profit-booking at higher levels as only 1 million shares were added to the OI at close compared to the intraday rise of 5 million shares. The Nifty March futures continued to trade at a discount to the spot and shed OI on every pullback.
The OI in the March futures has declined by 1.86 million shares in three trading days, while the price of its futures has gone up from 2,548.30 on March 9 to 2,766.25 now.