Will mkts continue rally beyond 5,500?

What a terrific Valentine's Day for the market. One could not have asked for more on this day. We have had a bad patch for the market. The first signs of short covering came in yesterday and look at what we did today. We started the day with a bang because Asian markets were all rallying. We started with a 500 points gap and just did not look back through the course of the day. There was no volatility. The market graph is a straight-line perking up towards the end. An 800 points rally on the Sensex to finish things off at 17,800. These relief rallies look so beautiful when they happen, especially these short covering rallies, because there was a large element of covering in today's price movement, at least in largecap names and in the Nifty.

There was very good breadth as well. One just wishes that there were more by way of volumes, because we are still not getting good volumes. Perhaps that will come later because conviction clearly has not come back yet. There was nothing to take away from the largecap price movement today. Excellent leadership right from the word go. Stocks like Reliance, RPL and even the ADAG's Reliance Energy, Reliance Capital, Reliance Communications all rallied. Hindustan Unilever had a fantastic session. BHEL jumped 12% today.

In two-days, Unitech has put on nearly 25%. One has to mention oil. As the price hike kicked in stocks like HPCL, BPCL, IOC, and standalone refineries like Bongaigaon and Chennai Petro, and largecap names like ONGC all rallied meaningfully. That helped the market quite a bit towards the end. There was an upmove in power stocks. That segment has been beaten down quite a bit but today stocks like NTPC, Neyveli Lignite, PFC, and CESC looked quite hot. Even in metals, stocks like SAIL, Hindalco, and Sterlite looked very smart. So, there was no problem with the largecap leadership at all today.

Even more spectacular was the way some of those momentum stocks moved. While there was short covering happening in the largecap universe and the Nifty, we saw some build up happening in stock futures in many of those midcaps. Stocks like IFCI, RNRL, Ispat, Nagarjuna Fertilisers, Essar Oil, and JP Hydro gave returns of 10-15% today. Sugar looked strong led by Balrampur Chini. Infrastructure stocks, which has been beaten down, like GMR, Punj Lloyd, Praj Industries, Lanco Infratech, were all up and jumping.

Stocks like Deccan Aviation did well. In the banking space, IndusInd, DCB, and Syndicate Bank were all up quite a bit. Great show from midcaps. We have come back to 5,200. The moot point is how much more do we have in this rally? Do we go all the way up to 5,500? Do we break past it or will the rally fizzle out before that? It still doesn't have volumes and not much by way of belief or conviction, but at least the price movement over the last couple of days, spurred on by short covering, has been very spectacular.

Let us hope we can close off, what has been a very good second half of the week in tomorrow's session. But today, it looked very sparkling.

Disclaimer: This is not an original publication.