Small caps ride the bull charge

After a rally in mid-cap stocks, now it's the turn of small-cap stocks to make merry on the bourses. The newly introduced Small-Cap index on the Bombay Stock Exchange today closed at its all-time high at 3954.54.

The BSE launched the Small-Cap index on April 11, 2005, for tracking the performance of companies with relatively small market captialisation.

The Small-Cap index has outperformed other indices, including Sensex and S&P CNX Nifty, in the last one week (since April 19). The index has gained 5.5 per cent compared with 3.3 per cent gains in the Sensex and 2.5 per cent rise in the S&P CNX Nifty. The BSE Midcap and NSE CNX Midcap 200 index gained 3.8 per cent each during the week.

The Small-Cap index gained 204.69 points from 3749.85 on April 19 to close at 3954.54 today. On the other hand, the BSE Midcap index gained 115.74 points to 3141.45 and NSE CNX Midcap 200 by 103.40 points to 2855.45 in the same period.

The Small-Cap index exclusively represents companies listed on the exchange having an average market capitalisation between Rs 53 crore and Rs 417 crore.

Out of the 425 companies included in the index, 167 reported higher gains than the index return of 5.5 per cent. Twenty one scrips appreciated more than 20 per cent and 69 scrips recorded around 10-20 per cent gains.

Crisil at Rs 792.20, Gujarat Flurochemicals (Rs 706.90), Dynamatic Technologies (Rs 513.65), Balkrishna Industries (Rs 471.60), Emco (Rs 367.70), Videocon Industries (Rs 339.65), Elecon Engineering (Rs 237.65), Punjab Chemicals (Rs 228.40), Hyderabad Industries (Rs 221.30), Esab (Rs 210.40), Balmer Lawrie (Rs 258.05) and TRF (Rs 179.40) are trading at their life-time high on the BSE.

Institutional investors which accumulated most of the frontline stocks in the last one year have now shifted their focus to fundamentally strong small and mid-cap stocks.

Alstom was the biggest gainer with 45 per cent appreciation in its scrip price from Rs 139 on April 19 to Rs 202.30 today.

Jagatjit Industries scrip went up by 36 per cent to Rs 59.25 from Rs 43.55 a week back.

Wartsila at Rs 438 (Rs 322.64), TRF at Rs 179.40 (Rs 133.44), Kennametal Widia at Rs 350.90 (Rs 264) and ABG Heavy Industries at Rs 117.25 (Rs 90.70).