Live: Banks drive rally; Sensex hovers near record highs

1:30 pm Railway stocks in focus

Raliway stocks saw huge buying interest, up 6-12 percent intraday today after the Narendra Modi Government released its first order for railway wagons.

Media report suggested that the Railways board issued orders to listed wagon manufacturers including Texmaco Rail, Titagarh, Cimmco, and also to unlisted entities such as Modern Industries, Hindustan Engineering, Besco and Jupiter Wagons, informing them of the decision to release 50 percent of their respective withheld allocations.

The allocation to individual manufacturers was done in April when 50 percent of that allocation was immediately ordered and the balance withheld, to be issued at a future date at the discretion of the Railways board, the report added.

1:00 pm: Stocks continued to trade steadily higher in afternoon Mumbai trading, slightly off the day’s fresh all-time highs hit early.

Bank stocks were buoyant following a merger deal between Kotak Mahindra and ING Vysya announced yesterday.

At the time of writing, the Sensex was up 0.65 percent, or 183 points, to 28,254 while the Nifty gained 0.69 percent, or 58 points, to 8,460.

The top five gainers in the Nifty were all banks: Kotak, SBI, Axis Bank, ICICI and PNB, surging 2.3 percent to 6 percent.

Among the laggards, Jindal Steel was down 2.6 percent, Infosys was off 1.7 percent while Tata Steel erased 1.3 percent.

Consumer non-durable shares too were muted, with leader HUL falling nearly 1 percent.

Traders attributed the up move to expectations increasing confidence in the economy and easy liquidity would trigger a fresh bout of merger and acquisition activity, following yesterday’s Kotak deal and Tech Mahindra’s USD 240 million acquisition of US-based LCC. More information please visit this site www.bigprofitbuzz.com