Bulls surge ahead
Mumbai: Bears exerted pressure during the initial hours of Thursday's trading activity. Thereafter, bulls took over and wiped out their early losses, say reports. Bears managed to gain marginally from the day's trading.

The market sentiment reading of the tradable counters continues to remain bullish. Bear domination on Friday is likely to change the sentiment reading in their favour.
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Vedanta listed on LSE, gets oversold
Mumbai: The Sterlite group's holding company, Vedanta Resources, has raised $1 billion on the London Stock Exchange at £3.9 per share. The open offer, which closed on Thursday, pegs the market value of the holding company at over $2 billion. Vedanta will start trading from today, and is angling to become a part of the FTSE-250 index, a source close to the development was quoted as saying, noting that the Vedanta issue is the third largest in the world from a mining company.

Vedanta's $700 million initial public offer of 110 million shares was oversubscribed almost five times, raking in bids of close to $4 billion. The company had decided to retain 36 per cent of the oversubscription, and will now issue 150 million shares.
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FII sells 3.5% in ICICI Bank for Rs 572 crore
Kolkata: HWIC Asia Fund, a foreign institutional investor (FII), has offloaded around 3.5 per cent of its holding in ICICI Bank. The FII has, thus, booked a 83 per cent profit on its holding by selling it at an estimated Rs 572 crore and booked a profit of close to Rs 260 crore. Formerly known as Orcasia Ltd, HWIC held around 7.5 per cent in the bank prior to offloading its stake. At present the FII's stake in the bank is close to 4 per cent.

ICICI Bank officials said HWIC offloaded a portion of its stake in the open market. Orcasia picked up 7.54 per cent in the bank from the open market in September 2002. It held on to the stake till December 2003 and has only recently offloaded as much as half of its holding. Orcasia picked up the stake at a time when the stock was ruling at around Rs 147, and has offloaded it when the stock was ruling at Rs 269 — a Rs 122 capital accumulation per share over 16 months.
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Report: 216 stocks scale all-time highs since 1 Nov
Mumbai: The current rally on the bourses has seen nearly 216 stocks soaring to their all-time highs between 1 November and 3 December, says a media report. Of these, 52 are from the A group, 99 from the B1 group, 43 from the B group and 22 are from the Z group.

Bajaj Auto, BHEL, BSES, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Grasim Industries, HDFC, HDFC Bank, Hindalco, ICICI Bank, Ranbaxy Labs, Reliance Industries and Tata Steel are the Sensex stocks which hit all-time highs in the period.
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NSDL cuts transaction charges
Mumbai: National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) has decided to reduce the transaction charges by 20 per cent from Rs 10 to Rs 8 per transaction. These changes will come into effect from 1 January 2004. NSDL in a statement on Thursday said charges to the depository participants (DPs) has been reduced from Rs 10 to Rs 8. It also said that NSDL believes that the reduction will enable the DPs to reduce their charges to the investors.

The NSDL move to reduce charges follows the increase in the number of transactions in the recent past. The depository officials said that keeping in line with its policy of passing on the benefit of increased volume in the market, NSDL has revised the fee structure. The country's first depository has also reduced the corporate action fee (for rights and bonus issue) from Rs 10 to Rs 8 per record, payable by issuers.
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