Nifty drops over 1% amid Middle East conflicts

15 Apr 2024 Evaluate

Indian equity benchmark -- Nifty -- ended Monday’s trading session near day’s low point, amid rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle East where Iran launched retaliatory attack on Israel. Index made a gap-down opening, as traders were concerned with a private report stating that exporters are in a wait-and-watch mode as they expect air freight volume to Europe to rise 10-15%, logistics and insurance costs to rise and engineering exports demand to Europe to get impacted following Iran's attack on Israel. Traders overlooked positive macro-economic data. The government data showed that India's retail inflation eased to 4.85 per cent on an annual basis in March as against 5.09 per cent in the previous month. Also, the data provided by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) showed that the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) in India rose 5.7 per cent in February as against 3.8 per cent in January.

In afternoon session, index continued to trade on a lower note and remained lower till the end, as sentiments remained downbeat with the provisional data released by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry showing that India’s wholesale price index (WPI)-based inflation accelerated to 0.53 per cent in March on an annual basis, as against 0.20 per cent in February. WPI inflation stood at 1.34 per cent in March 2023. Traders overlooked report that India’s forex reserves jumped by $2.98 billion to a fresh peak of $648.562 billion for the week ended April 5. In last leg of trade, index slipped near day’s low point and ended with losses of 246.90 points.

Most of the sectorial indices ended in red except Oil & Gas stocks. The top gainers from the F&O segment were Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Indus Towers and Exide Industries. On the other hand, the top losers Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services, Atul and Coforge. In the index option segment, maximum OI continues to be seen in the 22900 - 23100 calls and 21900 - 22100 puts indicating this is the trading range expectation.

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