A sudden spurt of buying towards the fag end of trading, sparked by the government's decision on Thursday to divest 10 per cent in all listed companies, pushed the benchmark Sensex up by more than 150 points to regain the 16,000-level after three days.

Markets turned bearish in early trade after yesterday's rebound rally on weak cues from Asia and plunged to 15,564 points. Sentiment, however, turned bullish within minutes of Home Minister P Chidambaram announcing the Cabinet decision to divest 10 per cent stake in all listed companies. Government also decided to list all profit-making public sector firms with a positive networth.

After a roller-coaster ride, which saw the Sensex swinging over 500 points, the 30-share index finally closed the day at 16,063.90, netting a rise of 151.77 points or 0.95 per cent over its previous close.

Small-cap and mid-cap stocks attracted brisk buying with their indices rising by 1.82 per cent and 2.02 per cent.

Shares of the telecom companies were flavour of the day. Brokers said reports of government planning to reduce licence fee for telcos attracted heavy buying in these stocks. Sensex stocks Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel posted impressive gains of 5.34 and 4.50 per cent respectively.

"The market is in a pull-back mode as it has witnessed vertical sell off in the earlier sessions. It is more of a bounce back kind of a trend. The long term uptrend is still intact and investors should put in money in the index stocks at every lows," said Kotak Securities Vice President Technical Research Shrikant Chouhan.

... contd.