Banks propel markets to new highs

Bank Nifty surged more than 2.5 per cent on Friday as against the 1.6 per cent rise of Nifty.

Friday's market performance was dominated mainly by largecaps. ICICI Bank Ltd contributed the most to the index gain, increasing 3.3 per cent, while Tata Steel had the largest increase, rising 6.5 per cent, said Devarsh Vakil, Deputy Head of Retail Research at HDFC Securities.

After Thursday's recovery from lower levels, Nifty registered a follow up move on Friday with a giant leap of more than 350 points to close at 22,339, a new all-time high, he said.

Nifty Midcap 100 and Smallcap 100 indices underperformed the Nifty, gaining by 0.94 pert cent and 0.52 pert cent, respectively.

Advancing shares outnumbered the declining shares as the advance decline ratio stood at 1.62 levels on the BSE. Among the sectoral indices, Nifty Metals, Banks and Auto gained the most while Nifty Media, Pharma and IT ended in the red, he said.

The impressive GDP numbers provided the ammunition to the bulls to catapult the Indian indices to all-time highs, he said.

The Indian equity markets will remain open on Saturday as part of the framework for the business continuity plan and disaster recovery site for stock exchanges and depositories, and would involve an intraday shift from the primary to the disaster recovery site.