Nifty hovers around 8850; Maruti, Idea Cellular in focus

10:30am FII View

Jonathan Garner, Morgan Stanley says main model changes this month are to upgrade India to overweight and downgrade Brazil back to underweight, taking us more overweight on Asia and underweight on EMEA and Latin America.

"In part, this change is due to our introduction of a new "thematic sensitivity" factor into our model designed to capture the impact of two major top-down themes - a lower oil price and the impact of a sharply rising US Dollar on external debt service payments," he adds.

"Frustratingly, our model process failed to generate alpha from India last year, as it spent the entire year equalweight. Two key factors where India scored poorly remain weak spots: relative valuations & positioning," Garner says.

10:00am Market Check

Equity benchmarks continued to see marginal gain in morning trade. The 30-share BSE Sensex rose 109.86 points to 29388.70 and the 50-share NSE Nifty climbed 19.35 points to 8854.95.

The broader markets outperformed equity benchmarks as the BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices gained 0.8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively. About 1156 shares have advanced while 821 shares declined on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Maruti Suzuki rose over a percent ahead of third quarter earnings today. A expects the car maker's profit to jump 29 percent year-on-year to Rs 875 crore and revenue to increase 13.4 percent to Rs 12,352 crore from Rs 10,893.8 crore year-on-year.

Idea Cellular also gained 1 percent as third quarter profit of the telecom operator may jump 3.8 percent sequentially to Rs 785 crore and revenue may increase 5.4 percent to Rs 7,981 crore.