Budget Cheers The Market

If February 2010 has broken the trend of having the pre-budget rally then, the fag end of February has trashed the jinx of market crash on the budget day. All the credit goes to the man in the hot seat i.e. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who pre-sented a budget specifically for the bourses.
The BSE Sensex opened at 16,264 points on February 25 and touched its bottom on the same day at 16,167 points but then came the booster dose of the budget on the succeeding day and it has not looked back since then. The Sensex touched its highest level of 17,187 points on March 8 before closing at 17,052 points on March 9, gaining vital 788 points to jack it up above the crucial 17,000 points mark. In the same way NSE Nifty opened very soberly at 4,859 points and dived to touch 4,835 points on the same day. However, soon after the budget it didn’t look back and rose to 5,147 points before closing at 5,101 points, gaining 242 points during the fortnight.
As far as global indices are con-cerned, US Dow has also shown some resilience with a 1.79 per cent jump. On the contrary, UK’s FTSE was the only index that was on the losing side with a 4.58  per cent decline but at the same time Germany’s Dax was the biggest gainer with a 5.63 per cent appreciation followed by Brazil’s Bovespa, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, Japan’s Nikkei, Singapore’s STI, Taiwan Wtd and South Korea’s Seoul Composite.
FIIs came back into the markets and made merry at the bourses with a net purchase of Rs 4,090 crore. On the other hand, Indian mutual funds were found selling with net sales going past the Rs 458 crore level. The combined turnover of NSE and BSE wandered between Rs 16,085 crore (on February 25) and Rs 21,108 crore.
As far as individual scrips are con-cerned, out of the total listed entities, 2,215 stocks moved forward while 587 slipped backward and 24 stocks remained unchanged. As far as gainers are concerned, Jet Airways remained the biggest gainer with 19.85 per cent followed by Lanco Infra, Mahindra and Mahindra, Sterling Biotech and Sesa Goa which gained 18.06 per cent, 17.16 per cent, 16.11 per cent and 15.98 per cent respectively. On the contrary, NMDC lost almost 12.44 per cent to become the biggest loser of the fortnight followed by BPCL, IOC, REI Agro and Hindustan Copper.
Looking at the Sensex’ performance and taking an account of the disinvest-ment plan of the government, it seems that the market is well-poised for an upward journey from here. However, it depends on many factors such as RBI’s monetary policy, yearly performance of India Inc. and, above all, the infla-tion level.