Financial Market Overview

Indian Rupee

The Indian Rupee, after briefly touching the 86 mark, found stability around 85.80 per US dollar today. This movement came after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) implemented a larger-than-expected interest rate cut of 50 basis points, bringing the repo rate down to 5.5% in response to softening inflation. However, a recovery in the US dollar index, nearing the 99 mark, prevented significant gains for the Rupee. As a result, the INR is currently quoting flat at approximately 85.80 per US dollar.

Indian Equities 

The Nifty was trading up by 233.00 points at 24,983.90, while the Sensex was trading up by 702.07 points at 82,144.11.

Indian stock markets surged today, with the Sensex and Nifty50 both nearing 1% gains, following the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) monetary policy announcement. The RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) surprised markets by implementing a 50-basis point repo rate cut and reducing the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) by 100 basis points, shifting its stance to 'Neutral' despite the Governor's later comments indicating limited future rate cut potential. This pro-growth move, coupled with potential easing of gold loan norms, fueled a rally across rate-sensitive sectors like banking, realty, and auto, with the Nifty Bank index hitting a new all-time high, and gold finance companies like Muthoot Finance and Manappuram Finance seeing significant rises.

Major gainers on Nifty were Coal India, Dr. Reddy, Indusind Bank, Tata Steel, NTPC, Eternal while major losers included Tata Motors, Trent, HDFC Life, Apollo Hospital, Bajaj Finserv

Global Market

Asian market traded positive as follows:  Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down by 84.37 points at 23,822.60, the Nikkei 225 was up by 187.12 points at 37,741.61, Shanghai Composite is up 1.26  points at 3,385.36.

The FTSE 100 to open down 9.4 points, 0.1%, on Friday. The index of London large-caps closed up 0.1% at 8,811.04 on Thursday. DAX futures are down 0.27%. CAC40 futures edged slightly lower at 0.04%. FTSE MIB is expected to open lower as well.

Wall Street traded as follows: S&P 500 went down by 31.51 points at 5,939.30, Dow Jones futures went up by 181.16 points at 42,500.90, and Nasdaq Composite futures went up by 87.50 points at 21,669.75.

The price of a barrel of Brent crude was down by 0.45 points to $64.89.