Ram Sahgal
ram.sahgal@livemint.com
MUMBAI
The Nifty soared to a Trecord high of 22,252.50 for the fourth straight session on Thursday after gyrating 377.25 point sbetween the day’s low and high. The recovery in the lasthour and a half of trade was driven by domesticinstitution buyingin technology, fast moving consumer goods (FMCQG) stocks and Reliance, after artificial intelligence (AI) major Nvidia soared 14%in pre-market trading on the Nasdaq in the US, causingaglobal stockmarkets rally. Domestic institutional investors (DIIs) net purchased shares worth a provisional X1,828.63 crore while FIIs net sold shares worth %1,410.05 crore. Additionally, optionsellerscovered theirbearish bets. The highintraday volatility, attributed by market analyststo the weekly expiry of the Nifty option contracts, resulted in call option sellers losing their shirts because of the steep recovery in the last hour and a halfof trade. Theindex opened with gains of 26 points at 9:15 am, but the gainswere wiped out quicklyas selling engulfed the market and dragged the Nifty down fourfifths ofa per cent toan intraday low of 21,875.25 pointsby 11 am. The index traded in the red until 2 pm, after which bulls emerged and pulled up the benchmark to a record high before closing up 0.74% to 22.217.45. ‘\ Recovery in the last 1.5 hours of trade was driven by DIl buying in stocks such as tech. MINT Such was the nature of the recovery that the 22000 Nifty call option which traded at 38.25 a share (50 shares equal one contract) expired at 3217.05, a whopping 26-fold jumpintraday. “Thursday’s highly volatile trade is because of the Nifty weekly options expiry,” said Rajesh Palviya, senior VP at Axis Securities. “The bulls trapped the call writers who sold anincremental 30.89 lakh shares a day before buying index stocks heavily after 2 pm on Thursday inresponseto the blowout rally in Nvidia, which caused the index to reverse its losses and hitarecord high.” The Sensex, which recouped all of its losses to close in the green, failed to surpass its record high of 73,427.59 on 16 January, ending the day up 0.74% at73,158.24. The key contributo
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