Sensex Jumps 414 Points, Nifty Tops 23,100 As Tech Mahindra Leads IT Rally

Friday turned out to be a good day to be holding IT stocks. The BSE Sensex (that’s the Bombay Stock Exchange’s benchmark of 30 large Indian companies) closed at 74,729.27, up 413.66 points or 0.56%. The NSE Nifty 50 (the National Stock Exchange’s basket of the top 50 companies) ended at 23,146.15, up 148.80 points or 0.65%. Put together, the Indian stock market just had its best week in nearly 27 weeks, with the Nifty gaining close to 3% over five sessions.

The big reason for today’s cheer was a blockbuster set of September-quarter results from Tech Mahindra, which jumped nearly 8.5% and dragged the rest of the IT pack up with it. If you are holding IT stocks or IT-heavy mutual funds, today added some real gains to your portfolio. The rupee also had a quietly good day, strengthening for the sixth session in a row, while crude oil stayed stubbornly high near $105 a barrel and kept a lid on how far the overall rally could run.

Market At A Glance

Here’s how the key Indian stock market indices closed today.

Note: Closing index levels for Nifty Midcap 100 and Nifty Smallcap 100 were not available from today’s reports, so only their percentage moves are shown above.

Why The Market Moved

If you’re new to tracking the Indian share market, here’s the simple version of today’s story. Tech Mahindra’s September-quarter profit jumped over 32% from a year ago, way more than analysts had expected, and the stock shot up. Since Tech Mahindra is part of the Nifty IT index, and IT as a whole is a big chunk of the Nifty 50 and Sensex, this one result ended up lifting the entire market. Wipro also added to the mood with a strong revenue number of its own. This was the fourth straight session where IT stocks led the gains, and the Nifty IT index is now up about 10% just this week.

There was also an important rule change from SEBI (the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the market regulator) that is worth knowing if you trade in F&O — futures and options, the derivative contracts that let traders bet on where a stock or index is headed without owning the actual shares. SEBI decided that expiring stock and index derivatives will now be settled using the VWAP (volume-weighted average price) of the last 30 minutes of trading, rather than the closing-auction method it had proposed earlier, after push-back from brokers and traders. This matters because it changes how your F&O positions get settled on expiry day, and a lot of derivative traders were tracking it closely today.

On the other side, two things kept a ceiling on the rally. First, crude oil prices stayed high, near $105 a barrel, because of ongoing tension in the Middle East. For India, expensive crude is never just an oil story — we import more than 85% of our crude needs, so when oil gets costlier, our import bill goes up, the rupee comes under pressure, and eventually it can feed into inflation. Second, US bond yields and producer price data kept global investors a bit cautious, and that showed up as persistent FII (foreign institutional investor) selling in Indian equities, something we’ll get into below.

Which Sectors Held Up, And Which Didn’t

It was a split day for sectors. IT was clearly the star, while a few defensive and consumption-linked sectors slipped into the red.

IT stocks zoomed close to 4%, by far the best-performing sector, riding on Tech Mahindra’s results and continued buying in Wipro, TCS and Infosys. Metal and auto stocks also found buyers through the day. Nifty Bank barely moved, up just 0.06%, as investors turned cautious ahead of quarterly results due soon from HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank — if you hold banking stocks, next week’s earnings will tell you a lot about how this sector performs into the year-end. On the weaker side, FMCG, consumer durables and realty stocks gave up some ground, as money rotated out of these defensive names and into IT. Nifty Media was a quiet positive story too, hitting a fresh record high during the session.

Today’s Top Movers

Here are the Nifty 50 stocks that moved the most today, in both directions.

Top 5 Gainers

Tech Mahindra topped the gainers’ list by a wide margin after its profit beat, and the two other big IT names, TCS and Infosys, weren’t far behind. Bharti Airtel and Mahindra & Mahindra also had a good day, adding to the overall positive mood.

Top 5 Losers

InterGlobe Aviation, which runs IndiGo, was the biggest loser today, slipping almost 2% — a reminder that high crude oil prices hurt airline stocks directly since fuel is their biggest cost. BSE Ltd, Max Healthcare, Tata Consumer Products and Jio Financial Services were the other names that ended lower, though the losses here were much smaller than the gains on the winning side.

What FIIs and DIIs Were Doing

You’ll often hear the terms FII and DII when people talk about the Indian stock market, so here’s a quick explainer if you’re newer to investing. FIIs, or Foreign Institutional Investors (sometimes also called FPIs, Foreign Portfolio Investors), are big global funds that invest money from outside India into our stock market. DIIs, or Domestic Institutional Investors, are Indian institutions — mainly mutual funds, insurance companies like LIC, and pension funds — investing money that Indian savers have put into things like SIPs (systematic investment plans, where you invest a fixed amount every month into a mutual fund). Watching what these two groups are doing on any given day tells you a lot about who is driving the market.

Today’s own FII/DII figure for the cash segment hadn’t been released by the exchanges at the time of writing this piece — that data usually comes out later in the evening. Here’s what we know for the last four trading sessions, with dates:

Notice the pattern here: FIIs have been net sellers every single day this week, and on Thursday that selling jumped sharply to over ₹5,285 crore. But DIIs — essentially your own SIP money and insurance premiums working in the background — have been net buyers every single day too, consistently putting in ₹2,400 crore to ₹3,300 crore. This is exactly why the market hasn’t fallen despite foreign investors pulling money out — domestic investors, a lot of them ordinary retail investors through mutual funds, have been quietly absorbing that selling and cushioning the market. It’s one of the clearest examples of how SIP flows have changed the character of the Indian stock market over the last few years.

Oil, The Rupee, And Global Cues

Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices (quoted in US dollars because it’s an internationally traded commodity), eased slightly to around $105.56 a barrel, down about 0.34% on the day. That’s a small dip, but crude has stayed stubbornly above the $100 mark for weeks now because of tension around the Middle East and worries about supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route for oil. For us in India, this isn’t just a number on a chart — since we import the bulk of our crude, expensive oil directly inflates our import bill, which in turn puts pressure on the rupee and can push up inflation at home through costlier fuel and transport.

Speaking of the rupee, USD/INR (the rupee’s exchange rate against the US dollar) closed around ₹94.92 to the dollar, up about 7 paise or 0.07% — its sixth straight session of gains and its best weekly show since March. This wasn’t really the market’s own doing; the Reserve Bank of India has reportedly been selling dollars and using dollar-rupee swaps worth an estimated $75-80 billion since June to support the currency and stop it from sliding too far. High crude prices and the steady FII outflows we talked about above are still working against the rupee, so this strength is coming from active RBI defence rather than pure market momentum.

On the global cues front — and we use that phrase deliberately instead of talking about “the market” in some generic Western sense, because what happens in the US, Europe or Asia only matters to us through how it affects Nifty, Sensex and the rupee — global markets were recovering after a sharp tech-led sell-off earlier in the week. The Dow and Nasdaq had steadied, US Treasury yields had eased a bit, and that gave risk assets everywhere, including Indian equities, some breathing room. South Korea’s KOSPI bounced back hard after a near-8% fall in the previous session, and Japan’s Nikkei was also higher, both reinforcing the “relief rally” theme that played out in India today.

What To Watch Next Week

Since Saturday and Sunday are off for the Indian stock market, the next trading session is Monday. A few things worth keeping an eye on: banking sector earnings are the big one, with HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank all due to report results soon — given that Nifty Bank barely moved today, these numbers could decide whether banking stocks join the rally or continue to lag. Keep tracking whether the IT rally has legs left, since Tech Mahindra and Wipro have already reported, and Infosys, TCS and HCL Tech results are also now out of the way for this quarter.

Crude oil and the India VIX (the volatility index that measures how much swing traders expect in the market over the next 30 days) are also worth watching — India VIX ticked up slightly to 14.06 today, which is still a fairly calm reading, but any fresh escalation in the Middle East could change that quickly given how elevated oil already is. And of course, keep an eye on whether FIIs continue their selling streak or whether DIIs’ steady buying is enough to absorb it again, because that tug-of-war has been the real undercurrent beneath this week’s gains. None of this is a buy or sell call — just the key things that are likely to drive sentiment into next week.