Nifty ends flat ahead next week's RBI policy, F&O expiry

After trading in a tight range of 5650-5750 for the week, the benchmark Nifty shut shop tad below the 5700-mark on Friday. Indian equities were extremely volatile, which could be waiting for the events like Reliance Industries Q3FY11 results today evening, SBI quarterly earnings tomorrow, ICICI Bank numbers on Monday, RBI monetary policy on January 25 and expiry for the month of January on Thursday.

The markets remained in a negative terrain today, hammered by sell-off in realty, metal, FMCG, HDFC group, healthcare and select technology companies' shares along with ONGC and Bharti Airtel.

With a more bearish view, Rahul Mohindar of viratechindia.com said he does not see the Nifty holding 200 DMA. He feels that the markets will drill down low. "Several font line stocks continue to look weak and it is going to be very difficult for the market to even maintain itself above 5800 level. So I do not think we are going to see any kind of a great upside. Whatever we see is probably going to be more of intraday corrective upward rallies. On the whole, 5400-5500 is an area we probably knock in, which could happen over the next month." He said the weaker stocks would continue to be rate sensitive.

However, Anil Manghnani of Modern Shares & Stock Brokers believes that as long as Nifty continues to hold 5,600, there is still a possibility that the market can rally back to 5,830-5,900 levels before the next round of selling resumes. Gautam Shah of JM Financial sees support for the Sensex & the Nifty at 18700 and 5600.

However, downtrend was capped due to buying in Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group companies' shares along with RIL, SBI, ICICI Bank, BHEL and NTPC. European markets were also bit of supportive, which were up 0.5-1%.

The 30-share BSE Sensex closed at 19,007.53, down 39.01 points and the 50-share NSE Nifty fell 15.10 points to settle at 5,696.50. However, broader indices outperformed benchmark by small margin - the BSE Midcap Index was up 0.22% and Smallcap up 0.46%.

Global cues:

Asian markets were trading mixed. Shanghai bounced back with 1.9% jump. Hang Seng and Taiwan rose 0.2-0.5%. However, Nikkei and Kospi fell 0.9% each.