While Friday turned out to be the most volatile day for Indian stock markets with the benchmark Sensex trading in a range of nearly 5,400 points and the Nifty hitting the lower circuit of 10% before closing with a gain of nearly 4%, stock- specific action saw many blue-chips gaining over 20% compared to the day’s lows.
Banking majors such as IndusInd Bank, Bank of Baroda, State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank were among the top gainers in the BSE 100 index, comprising top 100 companies as per market capitalisation.
While IndusInd Bank gained a little over 46% compared to its day’s low, SBI, PNB and BoB gained between 30% and 39%.
IndusInd Bank touched a low of ₹550.05 before closing at ₹804. Similarly, SBI, which enjoys a high weightage in the Sensex as well, closed at ₹242.25 after touching an intraday low of ₹184.25, a gain of over 31%.
Meanwhile, the Sensex, which had touched a low of 29,388.97 during the morning session, touched a high of 34,769.48 before closing at 34,103.48, up 1,325.34 points or 4.04%.
The broader Nifty settled at 9,955.20, gaining 365.05 points or 3.81%. Interestingly, the market was abuzz with talks that Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) was among the major buyers in the market as most of the banking stocks were currently available at 52-week low levels.
“LIC is a long-term investor and banking is one of the favourite sectors of the State-owned insurance entity,” said a dealer.
“Most of the stocks are at their multi-year lows and hence, quite attractively priced at the current valuations. For a long term investor like LIC it only makes sense to buy at these levels,” he added.According to provisional data, domestic institutional investors that include banks and insurance companies were net buyers at almost ₹5,900 crore.
Apart from banking majors, stocks like Tata Steel, LIC Housing Finance, BPCL, HPCL and GAIL India also gained between 26% and 29% in intraday trading.
The intraday reversal in price movement could be further gauged from the fact that all the stocks in the BSE 100 index, which were significantly down during the morning session, ended with gains as the session came to an end.
