MUMBAI, OCT 6: Even as investors continued to throng the offices for redemption of US-64, financial institutions stepped in and made massive purchases to prop up the stock markets on Monday. After 224-point crash in Sensex on Monday, pivotals staged a modest rally and Sensex gained 42 points on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) today, thanks to institutions and purchases by bear operators to cover their short-sold positions.UTI is believed to have bought shares worth Rs 150 crore from the stock exchanges. Sensex (BSE sensitive index) recovered smartly from the session's low of 2820.77 points to cross the 2900 mark to finish at 2919.74 points, thus showing a net gain of 42 points over the previous close of 2878.07 points. The BSE-100 index gained 18.57 points to 1302.85 from the previous level of 1284.28.
Brokers said that despite repeated clarification by the UTI chairman P S Subramanyam that it has no plans to sell shares, prices suffered another sharp setback during the opening session taking the Sensexdown to the intra-day low of 2820.77. However, the sentiment turned for better following fresh support extended by both domestic as well as foreign funds.
However, investors lined up in UTI offices to redeem US-64 units. UTI sources said US-64 worth Rs 44 crore was redeemed on Monday. US-64 has a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore.
Encouraged by an handsome recovery at the Tokyo stock exchange and UTI's clarification, FIIs made small purchases in the index-based scrips, while they also reportedly sold in few counters. Domestic institutional investors led by UTI made good purchases stocks worth over Rs 150 crore in the fundamentally strong scrips like ITC, Satyam Computers, SBI, Reliance and Dr Reddy and others.
Satyam Computers clocked the highest turnover of Rs 348.25 crore of the total volume of business of Rs 1725.40 crore. The scrip firmed up by Rs 19.50 to Rs 553, ITC by Rs 31.50 to Rs 667.50, Hindustan Lever by Rs 94.25 to Rs 1656, Zee Telefilms by Rs 17.75 to Rs 605.50, Pentafour Software by Rs 22.75 toRs 667.50 and Telco by Rs 2.10 to Rs 131.60. SBI, however, dipped by Rs 8.10 to Rs 176.10.
On the NSE, pivotals opened lower, after moving in a narrow range, firmed up marginally towards the end on good buying support from bull operators and domestic financial institutions on the last day of the currency settlement. The S&P CNX Nifty index gained by 5 points to 845.75 from 840.75 points of the previous day. The total turnover on the NSE was Rs 1630.95 crore.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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