Stock markets last week

Nifty traded strong from Monday till Thursday, but fell sharply on Friday. It thus closed on a flat note for the week at 4083.

The major gainers during the week, in terms of price, were Shipping Corporation, Indian Bank, Tata Tea, Vijaya Bank, IVRCL, OBC, Aban Lloyds, Gujarat Alkali, Siemens, Parsvnath, MRPL among others. The major losers were MTNL, Cipla, Polaris, Titan, NDTV, UltraTech Cement, BajajHind, Alok Textiles among others.

Nifty snapshopt: Nifty closed on an extremely weak note on Friday with a loss of 94 points. Nifty futures also traded at discount of 10-12 points to the spot price. Analysts believe this is just a correction, as the implied volatility remained stable at 23-24 per cent, It was as high as 26-28 per cent when the markets fell in the past.

Open Interest Outlook: The momentum seen in rollovers continued on the expiry day, with aggressive long side rollovers seen across the board. Overall, 83 per cent of total open positions got rolled to the May series.

Rollovers in Nifty rose to 72 per cent. However, the total rolled-over open interest of 604,946 contracts is 3 per cent lower than that the previous expiry. Sugar and construction stocks witnessed strong rollovers, while the rollovers were weak in FMCG, IT, engineering & capital goods stocks.

Market Position: The OI in futures & options contracts on a stock is capped at 20 per cent of the free-float holding. If the OI position hits over 95 per cent of MWPL (market wide position limit), fresh OI is restricted, and the underlying stock can only be bought in the cash market or from a seller in the derivatives market.

Sector analysis: On the technology front, software majors TCS, Infosys Technologies, Wipro and Satyam saw a decline in OI with the prices moving down, indicating short positions being built up on account of the appreciating rupee.

Among the banking stocks, Kotak Bank saw an increase in OI, accompanied with increase in prices, indicating long positions are being built. Shipping counters saw buying support, with the prices of Shipping Corporation moving up by 18.7 per cent while OI increased by 28.9 per cent.

Put-call ratio: Nifty put-call open interest (OI) as on Friday April 27 was 1.16, compared with 1.27 as on Friday April 20. Nifty call options shed 73 lakh shares (-42.8%) & put options shed 1.03 crore shares (-47.8%) in OI, due to expiry of the April series. On Friday, the market witnessed an addition of 10.1 lakh shares in Nifty call options and 7.9 lakh shares in Put options.

FIIs investment in emerging markets: Overseas investors net bought $125 million worth of Indian shares during the week ended April 27, based on the provisional figures provided by BSE and NSE.

FIIs were net buyers on April 24 and 25 to the tune of $273 million and net sellers worth $148 million on April 23, 26 and 27. The overseas funds bought $1.53 billion in the emerging market stocks last week. The inflows were higher in Taiwan at $679 million, followed by South Korea at $259 million and Indonesia at $226 million.

FIIs in Derivatives: The cumulative FII positions as a percentage of the total gross market position in the derivatives segment as on April 26, 2007 is 38.16 per cent. It was at 36.50 per cent as on April 19. The total gross open interest position of FIIs stood at Rs 32,408 crore as against the market wide gross position of Rs 84,927 crore. As on April 27, the FIIs were holding 6.58 lakh contracts of index futures and 5.31 lakh contracts of stocks futures.

FIIs to FIIs trade: The six-lakh series of the BSE and the LS series on the NSE allows the FIIs to sell or buy among themselves, scrips of those companies in which the maximum ceiling for the overall FII investment has been attained. Simply put, when a company hits the FII ceiling, fresh buying by FIIs is capped but one FII can always buy from another FII within the overall limit.

Global markets: Asian stocks posted their first weekly drop this month as consumer confidence in the US, the region's largest export market, slumped to an eight-month low and Japan's industrial production unexpectedly slumped.

The Morgan Stanley Capital International Asia Pacific Index slid 0.7 per cent to 146.48. Japan's Nikkei 225 Stock Average slipped 0.3 per cent, while benchmarks in China, Indonesia and South Korea all reached record highs during the week.

European stocks fell for the first time in four weeks on concerns that slowing US economic growth may weigh on earnings and companies are over-spending on acquisitions.

STOCK OF THE WEEK: Syngenta India
Last week close: Rs 708.10;
Previous week close: Rs 521.00

Crop protection major Syngenta India spurted 36 per cent amid hopes of a higher price on delisting its shares and announcement of a good March quarter results.

Syngenta South Asia, a subsidiary of Syngenta AG, has agreed to buy the shares of Syngenta India on behalf of its parent Syngenta AG, and pay Rs 730 per share as exit price following the company's decision of delisting its shares from the exchange.

Further, the company also announced robust March quarter results with net profit at Rs 10.11 crore, while it recoded a net loss of Rs 1.31 crore in the corresponding period Q4FYO6 led by a 58 per cent growth in net sales at Rs 120.7 crore and an eleven-fold jump in operating profit at Rs 15.6 crore. The stock has more than doubled in the last six months and has gone up over 50 per cent in last month alone.