Sensex declines 435 points; Nifty settles at 14,982

Domestic indices declined for the fourth consecutive session on Friday, February 19, 2021. The S&P BSE Sensex dropped 434.93 points or 0.85 per cent to close at 50,889.76. The Nifty 50 index lost 137.20 points or 0.91 per cent at 14,981.65. The Sensex has corrected 2.42 per cent and the Nifty has slipped 2.17% in the four sessions.

Nifty Bank fell 745.40 points or 2.04 per cent to end at 35,841.60.

The broader market at BSE also declined to underperform the Sensex. The BSE Mid-Cap index was down 1.67 per cent while the BSE Small-Cap index depreciated 0.76 per cent.

Selling was broad-based. On the BSE, 1,182 shares rose and 1,779 shares fell. On the NSE, 12 shares advanced on the Nifty 50 index, while 38 shares declined. The five top gainers on Nifty 50 were UPL (up 2.56 per cent), Dr Reddy's (up 2.36 per cent), IndusInd Bank (up 2.27 per cent), Hindustan Unilever (up 1.78 per cent) and GAIL (up 1.43 per cent). The top five losers were ONGC (down 5.06 per cent), Tata Steel (down 4.06 per cent), Hero MotoCorp (down 3.75 per cent), Tata Motors (down 3.52 per cent) and SBI (down 3.52 per cent).

Covid-19 Update

Total Covid-19 confirmed cases worldwide were at 109,885,555 with 2,429,669 deaths. India reported 137,342 active cases of Covid-19 infection and 156,014 deaths while 106,56,845 patients have been discharged, data showed.

S&P Global Ratings forecasts

S&P Global Ratings has said that India will be one of the fastest-growing emerging market economies with a 10 per cent growth in the next fiscal. S&P Director, Sovereign & International Public Finance Ratings, Andrew Wood said this while speaking in a webinar on India outlook for 2021.

He said the forecast for India in 2021 is on the stronger side and shows that a lot of economic activity, which was frozen last year, is coming back online to normalisation.

S&P said India's economy has stabilised over recent months, with progressively better manufacturing, services, labour market, and revenue data. The hard part will be converting these trends into a sustained recovery over the next few years.

International Economy

In Europe, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson will chair a virtual meeting of leaders of the G-7 major economies on Friday and is expected to outline an ambition to cut the time to develop new vaccines by two-thirds to 100 days. Germany's regulator on Thursday declared that the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford vaccine was "highly effective" and said negative side-effects are short-lived.

In Asia, Japan's core consumer prices declined 0.6 per cent in January compared to a year earlier, according to data released on Friday by the country's Statistics Bureau. The latest jobless claims number signalled a setback in the labour market recovery. First-time filings for unemployment insurance totalled 861,000 last week, the highest level in a month, the US Labour Department reported on Thursday.

British retail sales tumbled much more than expected in January as non-essential shops went back into Coronavirus lockdowns, official data showed on Friday. Retail sales volumes fell 8.2% compared with December, a far bigger fall than the 2.5 per cent decrease forecast in a poll of economists. The Office for National Statistics also said public sector borrowing for January came in at 8.8 billion pounds ($12.3 billion), less than a forecast of 24.5 billion pounds in the poll. That took borrowing since the start of the financial year in April to 270.6 billion pounds.