Equity benchmark indices erased early losses on Monday and traded with strong gains in the afternoon trade following China's stand that it opposes a trade escalation with the United States and is ready to enter a dialogue.
The rollback of surcharge proposed in the Budget on foreign portfolio investors and measures to prop-up the economy announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman last week cheered the investors further.
At 2:45 pm, the BSE S & P Sensex was up by 708 points at 37,409 while the Nifty 50 edged higher by 196 points to 11,025.
At the National Stock Exchange, all sectoral indices except for Nifty metal were in the green. Nifty financial services gained by 3.8 per cent, PSU banks by 3.6 per cent and realty by 3.1 per cent. But metals slipped by 1.3 per cent.
Among the prominent gainers were Yes Bank, Adani Ports, Indiabulls Housing Finance, HDFC and HDFC Bank.
However, steel majors were down with JSW Steel showing a loss of 3 per cent, Vedanta by 1.82 per cent and Tata Steel by 1.81 per cent. Sun Pharma and Hero MotoCorp also lost by about 1.9 per cent each.
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Meanwhile, Asian shares sank as US President Donald Trump on Friday imposed an additional 5 per cent duty on 550 billion dollars of Chinese goods in the latest trade war escalation by the world's two largest economies.
Later on Monday, however, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said Beijing strongly opposes trade protectionism and blockade in the field of new technologies.
"China is making efforts to ensure the integrity of production chains, we are ready to resolve the existing problem through consultation and cooperation, we strongly oppose the escalation of the trade war," he said.
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