Markets Stage Smart Pullback To Close the Day in Green

After many session of duet between bulls and bears where bears were taking the lead, today bulls finally succeeded to loosen the stranglehold of the bears to catapult the Sensex higher by 358 points or 2 per cent at 18449 and the Nifty up 94 points at 5526. The mid cap index ended at 6827, higher by 73 points and the small cap index ended at 8462, up 101 points. It was Realty, CG, metals and banking stocks led from the front helped the market to rebound. Each sectoral index was up by more than two per cent. There was some good news on the macro-economic front, though. The business activity in the services sector grew at a faster clip in January than in the previous month, boosted by new orders and expectations of solid growth. On the global front, most Asian markets were shut on account of the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays. Japan's Nikkei slipped 0.25% after sluggish overnight leads from Wall Street and renewed violence in Egypt. There have been violent clashes between pro- and anti-government demonstrators on Wednesday on the growing clamor for the immediate resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. The US stocks had struggled overnight to end virtually unchanged.