Led by gains in auto stocks, Nifty soars to fresh record high

Mumbai : The Nifty started a fresh week by climbing to a new record high and closing level on Monday led by gains in automobile stocks, said Deepak Jasani, Head of Retail Research at HDFC Securities.

With this, the market cap of BSE-listed firms crossed the Rs 400 lakh crore mark.

At close, the Nifty was up 0.68 per cent or 152 points at 22,666. Cash market volumes on the NSE fell marginally to Rs 0.95 lakh crore, while the broader market indices underperformed vis-a-vis the Nifty, Jasani said.

Global equities posted modest moves -- mostly on the up -- as investors prepared for a busy week that includes US inflation data, the start of the first-quarter earnings season, and a European Central Bank interest rate decision, he said.

After showing a narrow-range movement on Friday, the Nifty shifted into a sustainable up move on Monday and closed the day higher by 152 points, said Nagaraj Shetti, Senior Technical Research Analyst, HDFC Securities.

After opening with an upside gap of 65 points, the market continued to move up for the better part of the session. A new all-time high was registered at 22,697 levels, he said.

Though the Nifty is placed at new highs, there is still no signal of any reversal pattern building up at the highs. The short-term uptrend of the Nifty remains intact and the next upside levels to be watched are around the 22,800 levels, Shetti said.

Vaibhav Vidwani, Research Analyst at Bonanza Portfolio, said the Nifty PSU Bank Index was in red as PSU banks reported slightly lower than expected numbers for advance and deposit growth which brought pessimism in the sector

Due to speculative purchasing and ongoing geopolitical concerns in the Middle East, which obscured the robust US employment growth in March, gold prices resumed their record surge on Monday, while silver was trading at around $28 per ounce, a three-year high internationally, Vidwani said.