Virus slams brakes on runaway stocks
₹1,322 crore worth of shares while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) net purchased shares worth ₹4,754.34 crore, implying that retail investors would have sold much more to account for the fall. Stocks that faced the worst selling on Wednesday included the Adani twins—Adani Ports and flagship Adani Enterprises—which fell around 6% each, and commodity stocks such as Coal India, UPL and Tata Steel which tanked 4–5%.
Among the small-caps, the worst hit were commercial services and supplies company Rattan India Enterprises, Indian Overseas Bank, Indiabulls Housing Finance, and Uco Bank, which fell over 10% each. Mid-cap counters that bore the brunt of the volatility included IRFC, PB Fintech (PolicyBazaar), Piramal Enterprises, Yes Bank, and Indus Towers, which shed 7.5–9%.
“High-beta counters (stocks more volatile than the index) are bound to be singed more when markets encounter volatility of the type we saw today," said Siddarth Bhamre, EVP research head, Religare Broking. “The rise in covid cases was the catalyst for the overdue correction.
I think we should stay in a 21,000–21,500 range until the end of the current fiscal." Bhamre said large-caps such as HCL Tech, Tata Consultancy Services, Eicher Motors, and Maruti Suzuki look good from a “valuation perspective" in the current market. Occasional sharp corrections are common in bull markets, and according to analysts, a 5–10% fall is possible after a rally that has stretched for seven weeks.
Even as the market roared ahead in the past few weeks, an important indicator of caution was building up: Cumulative bearish index futures bets by retail and HNI investors, nomenclatured “client" by the NSE. The exchange places market participants in four buckets—client, DII,
. Read more on livemint.com
