Sensex picks up speed on road to 12,000

Hectic buying took the Sensex well past the 11,700-point mark and the Nifty above the 3,500-point mark.

The Sensex closed at 11,747, up 109 points and the Nifty at 3,511, up 27.75 points. The gains were higher at 0.94 per cent for the 30-stock index compared with the 0.8 per cent appreciation for the 50-stock Nifty on the National Stock Exchange.

The sentiments were on a see-saw at the Bombay Stock Exchange on Wednesday as the index opened strong and then kept going for the first one hour and a half, stopping short of the 11,750-point mark, and started slipping.

But all the losses were made good in the last two hours as the Sensex put on nearly 100 points on the back of what brokers reported to be strong domestic fund-buying.

The Indian mutual funds were believed to be buying aggressively to accommodate the huge new fund collection and pumped in more than Rs 4,000 crore last month.

"Everyone was expecting at least the foreign institutional investors to slow down, now that the market has reached such a huge level, but when data came that FIIs had pumped in nearly Rs 500 crore on Monday, people were reassured," said a broker.

Another factor which kept the sentiments up were the expectations of strong corporate results round the corner as reports indicated robust sales and shipment numbers from automobile and cement manufacturers. Construction firms, too, have been reporting strong order book positions.

Pharmaceuticals, capital goods and FMCG stocks were the biggest gainers, followed by the banking and automobile sector stocks.

The BSE health care index rose by 3.14 per cent on Wednesday, as the capital goods index inched up 2.6 per cent and the FMCG index rose 1.6 per cent on the back of strong performance by Hindustan Lever. Some metal and PSU stocks, too, showed strong gains while information technology stocks slipped.