Opening Bell: Nifty above 16,000, Sensex gains over 200 points; all sectors in green

The Indian market opened on a flat note on the last trading day of the week amid volatile in global market and softening of oil prices on Friday.  

Benchmarks Nifty50 and Sensex gained half per cent each as the indices opened at 16,010.80 and 53,637.88 respectively.  

Nifty Midcap and Smallcap rose higher by 0.6% and 0.3% respectively in the broader market, while all sectoral indices sat comfortably in the green  

"Globally equity markets are likely to remain turbulent till the Fed meeting of 27th July. The most likely policy action by the Fed would be a 75bp rate hike by the Fed but even a 100 bp hike cannot be ruled out after the red hot June inflation print of 9.1%," said V K Vijayakumar, Chief Investment Strategist at Geojit Financial Services.

In India inflation is slowly trending down and is likely to decline further given softening commodity prices, which is a positive for India, he said.

He said the major drag on the market continues to be the FII selling which has exceeded $30 billion, so far this year. But this month, FIIs have been buyers for 2 days including yesterday. This means some of the FIIs have started buying in segments where valuations have become attractive, said Vijaykumar.  

"An important trend in the market is the strength in FMCGs. The FMCG index is up by 8.5% this year. This segment is a good defensive  play during this turbulence and a major technical advantage for the segment is that FII presence is limited  and, therefore, FII selling is not happening," he added. 

In the pre-open, the Sensex climbed over 200 points as 23 stocks advanced and seven declined on the 30-share index. 

Earlier, SGX Nifty, which indicates opening trend of the Indian market, was trading higher by more than 50 points to 15,985 on the Singaporean exchange around 8 am on Friday.  

Among other Asian markets, Japanese Nikkei 225 rose by 0.40%, while Chinese Shanghai Composite gained 0.10%. However, Hang Seng Index at the Hong Kong Exchange dropped around 0.7% around the same time.  

Earlier, the US market made a recovery from a lower level to end on a mixed note on Thursday. The Dow Jones closed lower by 0.46%, Nadaq ended with marginal gain of 0.03% and S&P 500 dropped 0.30% on Thursday.