Most of the momentum stocks lost more than 10 per cent today with many of them frozen at the 16 per cent limit. Although no significant deals are getting done, the latent demand is quite high.
Quite a few buy-offers for big blocks of shares are floating around but nobody is willing to sell at the current levels. This gives reason for hope since if the deals do not get completed in a reasonable time, the possibility of them getting executed in the market remains quite high.
In fine fettle
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Pharmaceutical stocks managed to be in good shape on the back of reasonable demand from a few foreign funds. The King Kong Brokerage is reported to have picked up 40,000 to 60,000 shares of Ranbaxy, Dr Reddy's and Glaxo today.
The poor liquidity in the stocks is preventing them from being more aggressive in buying, and with the overall future of the market not looking bright, a steadier approach of accumulation seems to be a prudent policy. This was one segment of the market which bucked the general weak trend.
Re-look at Aptech
Aptech, which was dumped by all and sundry not long ago, is now getting a second look by some of the funds. With the company having decided to go ahead with the demerger of Aptech into a software and training company and then to merge the software company with another associate company Hexaware in which the promoters have a substantial stake, fears that the whole process would not be beneficial to shareholders of Aptech made most of the institutional players dump the stock.
But now with the new valuations, some funds seem ready for a come-back to the counter. Not a bad decision given that at Rs 94 getting a 50-100 per cent return should not be a difficult proposition. The Holy Fund, which had cleaned its portfolio of the stock, is reported to have bought around 5 lakh shares in the last few sessions which helped the scrip stay afloat today.
And the rest
Open-Hire continued to pick up Infosys, while Big Daddy maintained its support to ITC, Reliance and Infosys. The change of hands in Zee continued which keep the stock at a fixed rate. Some token buying in MTNL and banking stocks such as State Bank was also rumoured, but the confirmation could not be obtained.