STATSGURU: Stock markets attain new peaks

ON FRIDAY, the Indian stock markets scaled new highs with the benchmark Nifty index ending the day at 11,278, up 111 points from the previous close. The Nifty is now up eight per cent since the beginning of the year, as seen in Chart 1.

The top gainers since January are Bajaj Finance, followed by TCS, Infosys, Bajaj Finserv and Kotak Mahindra Bank. On the other hand, as seen in Chart 2, the top losers are Tata Motors, Vedanta, HPCL, Bharti Airtel and Infratel.

Small-cap and mid-cap indices have underperformed the benchmark index since the beginning of this year, though they have made up some ground of late. As shown in Chart 3, the Nifty mid-cap index has fallen 11 per cent since the beginning of this year, while the smallcap index is down almost 20 per cent.

On the banking side, as seen in Chart 4, public sector banks continue to underperform their private sector counterparts. The IT sector continues to outperform the broader market, driven by strong gains for IT majors such as TCS and Infosys (Chart 5). On the other hand, pharma continues to lag the broader market, as do the NSE realty and infrastructure indices (Chart 6). The commodity index has also slipped mildly since the beginning of this year (Chart 7).

As shown in Chart 8, foreign portfolio investors have, at the aggregate level, pulled out ~75 billion from the equity markets since the beginning of this year, even as domestic institutional investors have pumped in close to ~645 billion over the period.