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Sensex Opens Flat; Realty and Energy Stocks Gain
Tue, 26 Mar 09:30 am

Asian stock markets are higher today as Chinese and Hong Kong shares show gains. The Shanghai Composite is up 0.4% while the Hang Seng is up 0.3%. The Nikkei 225 is trading up by 1.8%. While, the indices in the US moved between negative and positive territory throughout the session, with investors keeping their eyes on the US Treasury market.

Back home, India share markets opened on a flat note. The BSE Sensex is trading up by 49 points while the NSE Nifty is trading up by 22 points. Both, the BSE Mid Cap index and BSE Small Cap index opened up by 0.3%.

Barring IT stocks and telecom stocks, all the sectoral indices have opened the day in green with realty stocks and energy stocks leading the gainers.

The rupee is currently trading at 68.91 against the US$.

The rupee ended almost flat at 68.96 per US dollar Monday as participants preferred to wait on the sidelines to see the outcome of RBI's first-ever rupee-dollar swap auction.

The forex market sentiment revived towards the fag-end, offsetting early losses amid increased selling of the greenback by exporters, the reports noted.

At the Interbank Foreign Exchange market, the rupee opened on a weak note at 69.09 then fell further to 69.17 against the US dollar. The local unit, however, erased the initial gains and finished at Rs 68.96, down by just 1 paisa over its previous close.

On Friday, the rupee had ended lower by 12 paise at 68.95 against the American currency on rise in demand for the greenback from importers and sell-off in domestic equities.

The rupee-dollar swap auction announced by the RBI earlier in March will infuse Rs 350 billion into the system. The auction of US$ 5 billion for a tenure of three years will be conducted today.

Additionally, foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) bought equities worth a net Rs 1.5 billion on Monday. Ongoing flood of liquidity into both debt and equity coinciding with the stable dollar index has led to recent strength of rupee.

Foreign investors are back in the news.

The recent surge in the Indian stock markets can be also attributed to the strong foreign investor inflows into Indian equities.

The chart reveals the monthly trend in foreign investor flows into Indian equities over the last five years. The period almost coincides with the term of the Modi government.

Are Foreign Investors Coming Back to Indian Equities?

During this period, you can see that foreign investor participation in Indian equities shrank.

Over the last five years, foreign investors were net sellers in 24 months. Effectively, foreign investors were net sellers 40% of the time.

The chart shows that the highest monthly net foreign investor inflow over the last five years was recorded in March 2017 at Rs 337.8 billion.

However, foreign investor flows are influenced by a myriad of global factors and are susceptible to change course anytime.

Moving on to other news. As per an article in a leading financial daily, food inflation in the country is likely to go up to 2% in FY20 from the 0.7% estimated for FY19.

It can be noted that the low food prices have been one of the prime factors which has aided the RBI to be more accommodatory in its rate setting recently.

As per the report, low food prices in the last few months can be attributed to the prices of cereals and vegetables which have been low for some time.

Deregulation of markets, which saw delisting of vegetables from the Agriculture Produce and Marketing Committee Act (APMC) in 14 states, has helped the vegetable prices.

In the case of cereals, "active food management" policies have helped, and the government released buffer stocks in large quantities and went in for higher imports on this front.

Going forward, the food inflation is unlikely to shoot up sharply unless there is some shock related to weather events, the reports noted.

Now how this pans out going forward remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we will keep you updated of the developments from this space.

To know what's moving the Indian stock markets today, check out the most recent share market updates here.

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