HS Busy dons S Kumar's suiting

STREET SIGNS

In the absence of anything else, bulls had to make do with blaming Hurricane Katrina and it hand in shutting down oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now if you are wondering how on earth that had an effect on Monday's downturn, well, the oil prices touched a record $70 per barrel.

On an intensely volatile day, the only consolation for bulls was that markets showed enough resilience to recover much of their intra-day losses, though the Sensex still ended up some 45 points down from its weekend close.

Busy hunting textile
Desi fund, HS Busy was in the news after it made a big purchase at the textile counter S Kumars Nationwide. Along with its global investment arm, the fund picked up 1.5 crore shares of the company at Rs 44, which in effect represents a 11.6 equity stake in the company.

Of late, analysts have been singing praises of the company, which owns the Reid & Taylor brand. S Kumars Nationwide plans to invest around Rs 400 crore over the next four years for expansion.

Other plans include increasing the number of showrooms from 16 to 200 and retail outlets to 11,000 from existing 5,800 by 2008. Analysts note that the company is the only textile conglomerate in India with presence in all segments such as worsted, ready to wear, consumer textiles, home textiles and high value cotton fabric.

Considering the growth potential of textile industry apart from the outsourcing opportunity, can't blame HS Busy for backing the stock early enough. Another one who was itching to get into the counter was Jeweller fund, who also bought 15 lakh shares at Rs 44.

Another one who was quick on the take was desi Prudent Fund. The fund bought more than five lakh sdhares of Deccan Chronicle at Rs 336 levels.

The company announced on Monday that its board will meet shortly to finalise a FCCB/GDR issue, apart from considering organic and inorganic growth proposals.

In other news...
The investment arm of the Paris Bank has decided to offload its holding in Melstar Information Technology, just before the company was owing to announce its results.

The fund is said to have sold more than 3.5 lakh shares at Rs 26.13. We'll have to wait and see, whether that is any indication of how the results are going to be.

Another big deal happened at the Rolta India counter, where one Grand emerging market fund bought a big chunk of shares at Rs 156 levels.

Rolta India, which specialises in geo-spatial technology had recently signed a deal with US-based Intergraph Corporation for providing expert services to Geographic Information Systems.