Good Start in offing for markets!

The benchmark indices continued to rise on Thursday and scaled to new highs. They are hitting new lifetime highs and passing every hurdle with ease coming on its way. This reminds us of a verse from the poem by Maya Angelou, ‘Still I Rise’, which goes like this, “Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise, into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear, I rise, bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave, I rise, I rise, I rise.”

Despite closing at record high levels, just 16 stocks of Nifty 50 stocks closed in the green while the buoyancy in the markets was seen on the back of buying interest in HDFC Twins. Talking about the sectoral participation, the majority of the sectoral indices ended with losses wherein, Nifty Media and Metal were the top losers and on the other hand, Nifty Financial Services became the showstopper as it gained over a per cent.

Tracking solid cues from their western counterparts, the Indian markets are expected to open with glory on Friday as in the overnight development, all the three major indices on Wall Street ended at record highs. SGX Nifty trades up by 16 points at 13,760 levels.

Asian Indices are witnessing profit booking on the final trading session of the week as traders preferred to take profits off the table. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down by 0.70 per cent and slipped below the 26,500 mark, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 0.19 per cent to 26,757 and China’s Shanghai Composite was wavering around the neutral line.

Wall Street’s three main indices closed at record highs on Thursday with the tech-heavy Nasdaq outperforming main indices as it advanced 0.8 per cent. The key catalyst for the Thursday rally was the optimism of a fiscal relief package; however, the gains remained capped as optimism of fiscal relief was partly counterweighed by the report of jobless claims, which continued to accelerate.

Stocks in the European region closed mostly higher as the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine raised scenarios for a global economic recovery.