The Indian equity benchmarks edged higher on Thursday ahead of weekly expiry of index futures and option contracts led by gains in ICICI Bank, Infosys, Titan, Tata Consultancy Services, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Asian Paints, HDFC Bank and Mahindra & Mahindra. The Sensex rose as much as 498 points and Nifty was trading firmly above its important psychological level of 16,000. Most of the Asian markets were trading higher with Japan's Nikkei up 0.48 per cent, Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1.2 per cent, South Korea's KOSPI advanced 1.27 per cent and Taiwan Weighted advanced 0.13 per cent.
As of 9:33 am, the Sensex was up 320 points at 54,071 and Nifty 50 index advanced 90 points to 16,080.
Overnight, Wall Street capped another choppy day of trading Wednesday with modest gains for the major stock indexes, after investors combed the minutes from the Federal Reserve’s most recent interest rate policy meeting for clues about what the central bank may do next to fight inflation.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4 per cent, its third-consecutive gain, after spending much of the morning and early afternoon wavering between gains and losses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.2 per cent, while the Nasdaq rose 0.3 per cent.
Back home, buying was visible across the board as all the 15 sector gauges compiled by the National Stock Exchange were trading higher led by the Nifty Consumer Durable index's over 2 per cent gain. Nifty Auto, PSU Bank, Realty, Bank, Private Bank, Oil & Gas, Metal and IT indices also rose around 1 per cent each.
Mid- and small-cap shares were also witnessing buying interest as Nifty Midcap 100 index rose 0.93 per cent and Nifty Smallcap 100 index climbed 1.2 per cent.
Titan was top Nifty gainer, the stock jumped 5.5 per cent to Rs 2,125 after the company n Wednesday said its sales in the April-June quarter were up nearly three-fold on a year-on-year basis, helped by a low base of the Covid-19 impacted quarter in the last year.
Its network expansion and campaigns continued to progress well throughout Q1FY23, which was the non-disrupted first quarter in the last three years, said Titan in its quarterly updates.
Power Grid, Asian Paints, Wipro, ONGC, Sun Pharma, Mahindra & Mahindra, NTPC, Bharat Petroleum, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, TCS and Infosys also rose between 1.2-2 per cent.
On the flipside, Reliance Industries, Bajaj Finserv, Britannia Industries, Cipla, ITC, SBI Life and Coal India were among the notable losers.
The overall market breadth was extremely positive as 2.049 shares were advancing while 583 were declining on the BSE.
