The Sensex established itself comfortably above the 17k summit to end at 17117, higher by 95 points and the Nifty ended at 5135, up 25 points. The midcap index ended higher by 14 points at 6890 and the smallcap index gained 12 points at 8640.
The day had started on a rather quiet note. With Wall Street ending virtually unchanged and Asia too clueless, however, strong opening by the European bourses triggered fresh buying in our markets. The FTSE, DAX and CAC added upto a per cent each in opening trades.
Maruti made a late surge to end at the top of the BSE gainers list. The auto major raced ahead by 2.6% at Rs 1331. SBI added 2.4% at Rs 2341 and Reliance Communications rebounded from its intra-day lows of Rs 159 to end with gains of another 2.2% at Rs 168. The stock has now added 12% in the past three trading sessions. And the FMCG sector occupied centre-stage through the day. ITC extended its recent run by 2% at Rs 290 and Hindustan Unilever pared its early gains to end 1.7% higher at Rs 251.
And sugar stocks spurted on hopes that the government may re-impose import duty on white sugar. Dhampur Sugar, Sakthi Sugar and Simbhaoli Sugars gained more than 4% each, while Balrampur Chini, Bajaj Hindustan and Shree Renuka Sugars added 2-4% each.
On the losers side, ONGC weakened by 1.7% at Rs 1189 to emerge as the top loser on the BSE. HDFC Bank shed 0.9% at Rs 1887 and Tata Power lost 0.6% at Rs 1239. Index heavyweight RIL ended flat, with a negative bias, at Rs 1030.
The market breadth was neutral. Out of 2939 stocks traded on the BSE, there were 1401 advancing stocks as against 1414 declines.
SBI topped the value charts on the BSE with a total turnover of Rs 138.86 crore. This was followed by Tata Steel (Rs 136.11 crore), RCom (Rs 106.54 crore), Tata Motors (Rs 61.94 crore) and Hindalco (Rs 50.64 crore).
RCom led the volume charts with trades of 6.45 million. It was followed by Hindalco (3.44 million), Tata Steel (2.80 million), Jaiprakash Associates (1.56 million) and DLF (1.49 million).
