Nifty ends with modest losses after rangebound session

The equity benchmarks closed with marginal losses, pulled down by oil & gas, private financial, pharma, power, cement, metal and select telecom companies' shares. Overall, it was another consolidation day for the markets; they were positive in the first half of trade while they slipped into the red in the last one hour of trade.

However, SBI, TCS, Tata Motors, HCL Tech, Unitech, Wipro, Bharti, ITC, Maruti, BHEL, PNB, L&T and DLF remained on the buyers' radar today, which limited the losses to some extent.

Vibhav Kapoor of IL&FS said that the market could remain range-bound. "The range is expanding anywhere between 5,400 to 5,550 levels. Time is catching up with the fundamental bit, so range is expanding on the upside very gradually, maybe at the rate of about 10-12% a year."

However, Ambreesh Baliga of Karvy Stock Broking said the Nifty was headed higher in coming days. ''We are not recommending people to buy at this point of time because we find that the markets are expensive and possibly if we go higher, it will become more expensive,'' he added. Going forward, Baliga expected Nifty to make a move towards 5,550-5,600 in the next two to three weeks.
 
The 50-share NSE Nifty closed a tad below 5450, at 5,447.10, down 20.75 points or 0.38% and the 30-share BSE Sensex fell 44.61 points to 18,172.83. However, the Nifty August futures closed at 8 points premium, as per provisional data.

Heavyweight SBI rose 2%, it was the leader today. In the financial space, PNB was up 0.77% while private financials were down. ICICI Bank, IDFC, HDFC Bank, HDFC and Axis Bank fell 0.7-1.5%.

Among the other heavyweights like Reliance Industries and ONGC were down 0.9% & 1.6%, respectively. GAIL slipped 2.4% while Cairn rose 0.74%.