The Indian equity markets reclaimed lost ground in the final hours of trade. While the BSE Sensex closed higher today by 139 points, the NSE-Nifty closed higher by 43 points. Midcaps and Smallcaps underperformed the benchmark indices today. While the BSE Mid Cap index closed higher by 0.2%, the BSE Small Cap index closed the day higher by 0.3%. Barring consumer durable stocks, most sectoral indices posted gains, with IT stocks being the top gainers today.
As regards global markets, Asian indices closed on a mixed note today, with the Korean and Hong Kong markets posting the biggest gains. The rupee was trading at Rs 60.95 to the dollar at the time of writing.
As per a leading international daily, in a move to provide stimulus to the economy, the central bank of China is set to infuse $81 bn into its five biggest government owned banks. This is to counter slowing growth in the dragon nation, which has seen a series of weak economic data come out in recent months. China's economy has increasingly shown evidence of slowing down with metrics like industrial production and foreign direct investment hitting multi year lows during the month of August. With the goal of lifting business confidence and investment, the five lenders that seem slated to receive the stimulus are the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and Bank of Communications.
Steel stocks have closed the day on a mixed note. Bhushan Steel and JSW steel were the biggest gainers while SAIL ended the day on a losing note. As per news reports, Tata Steel plans to raise US$4 bn of debt from foreign banks. The money will be raised to refinance the existing debt which the company had taken to buy Corus. It may be noted that at the company's AGM last month the CFO had stated that the company might raise US$5-5.5 bn as a part of its debt refinancing exercise. Accordingly the company raised US$ 1.5 bn through bond issuance recently. And US$ 4 bn is in the pipeline. Raising money from foreign markets is obviously cheap as the interest rates are low. This is likely to result in significant cost savings and help in the bottomline growth.
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