Sensex reclaims 17k

Wed, 7 Sep Closing

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Profit booking towards the fag end led indices in the Indian stock market to shed some gains. However, they still managed to close the day in the positive territory and the BSE-Sensex was able to stay above the psychologically crucial mark of 17,000. It finally closed higher by around 200 points (up 1.1%) while the gains on NSE-Nifty stood at around 60 points. The BSE Mid Cap and BSE Small Cap indices also performed well, edging higher by more than 1% each. On the Sensex, around 4 stocks closed in the positive for every one that closed in the red.

Almost all the major Asian indices closed the day in the green while Europe is also trading in the positive territory currently. The rupee was trading at Rs 46.1 to the dollar at the time of writing.

It can be recalled that the markets staged a late recovery yesterday after opening the day on a negative note. However, there were no such worries today as the market looked in prime form right from the beginning and kept on gaining strength with each passing hour. Although the last hour and a half did see the indices coming off the day's highs, they nevertheless closed comfortably in the positive. Today's gains seemed to have come on the back of bargain hunting in Asian stocks as a steep sell off in recent times made most of the regional counters appear attractive again.

As per reports, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd. (ONGC) , the state owned oil exploration and production major has finally started pumping oil from a deep sea field in the prolific KG Basin. With this development, the company marks its entry in the promising high tech area, boosting its prospects to find more oil. It should be noted that although the KG Basin is rich in hydrocarbons, the region is not without its fair share of technological challenges and extreme conditions. ONGC is currently producing around 2,000 barrels of oil per day. The concerned blocks hold around 21 m tonne of oil reserves and oil equivalent gas. The project is five years behind schedule and ran into problems on account of an Australia contractor quitting midway due to bankruptcy. The stock of ONGC closed marginally higher today.

State Bank Of India (SBI), India's largest bank, also witnessed significant buying activity today and closed nearly 3% higher. As per reports, the bank has introduced a state of the art technology platform for financing its supply chain partners by using its internet banking platform. The advantage of this platform is that a corporate can upload the details of invoices raised by their suppliers and the details of invoices covering the supplies made to the dealers on SBI's internet banking platform. This would result into real time transfer and automated settlement of funds. Currently, 43 major corporates across a wide variety of industries are using this platform. It should be noted that the platform provides for both vendor as well as dealer financing.