Indian shares registered their second straight weekly gain on Friday, boosted by energy and automobile stocks and as a fall in U.S. Treasury yields made riskier assets more appealing.
The NSE Nifty 50 index advanced 0.28% to 17,786.80 at close, and the S&P BSE Sensex ended 0.34% higher to 59,959.85. For the truncated week, the benchmark indexes posted a gain of over 1% each.
“The strengthening rupee along with a softening treasury yield and decent Q2 earnings results are supporting the domestic market in the near term,” Vinod Nair, head of research at Geojit Financial Services.
The Indian rupee posted a weekly rise on bets that the U.S. Federal Reserve will pivot to smaller-sized rate hikes from December.
The benchmark U.S. 10-year yield was at 4.01%, down 20 basis points so far this week, after data showed U.S. consumer and business spending slowed in the third quarter, pointing to a possible peak in inflation that could allow the Fed to ease its aggressive rate hikes.
Globally, share markets were down on Friday as a near $1 trillion weekly wipeout in top tech stocks outweighed hopes of a slowdown in Fed and ECB rate rises.
In domestic trading, Nifty’s energy and automobile indexes closed 1.39% and 1.63% higher, respectively. The metal index dropped 1.46% after a 2.7% surge in the previous session.
India’s top carmaker Maruti Suzuki and conglomerate Reliance Industries were the top boosts to the benchmark indexes, climbing nearly 5% and 3%, respectively.
Maruti Suzuki beat estimates with a more than four-fold jump in quarterly profit, as it benefited from record sales volume.
Pharmaceutical major Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories closed 0.7% lower ahead of its quarterly earnings results.
($1 = 82.3680 Indian rupees)
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