Date:27/10/2007 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/10/27/stories/2007102752081700.htm

Back This recovery rally belongs to domestic institutions

12 FIIs have registered since October 17

K.S. Badri Narayanan

Chennai, Oct.26 The current rally — after the dramatic day of Sensex tanking 1700 point on October 17 that caused a trading halt for an hour — clearly belonged to domestic institutional investors.

Retail Investors

While foreign institutional investors’ were the net sellers to the tune of Rs 2,244 crore in the cash market (according to SEBI data) since the eventful day, domestic institutions were net buyers to the tune of Rs 2,726 crore. Domestic institutions are mutual funds, banks, insurance companies and other domestic financial institutions.

Though retail investors bought Rs 1,819 crore worth of shares during the period, they remained net sellers in the last four days. Proprietary traders also remained net sellers (Rs 351 crore) while non-resident Indians did not participate in a big way.

Including today’s provisional figure of NSE, FIIs net selling increased to Rs 3,481 crore in cash market

Interesting F&O data

However, FIIs data in F&O segment throws up interesting trading pattern. They were net sellers to the tune of Rs 9,851 crore (between October 17 and October 24), mainly on index futures and stock futures.

However, data pertaining to October 25 says they were net buyers of Rs 14,114 crore.

The SEBI data shows that they did not sell single contract of stock futures while they sold just Rs 4.82 crore of index futures. On the other hand, they bought Rs 6,846.22 crore of index futures and Rs 10,234.38 crore of stock futures on that day while they have offloaded index options worth Rs 3,648.48 crore against the buying of Rs 713.56 crore.

Number of FII registrations moved up from 1,113 on October 17 to 1,125 on October 25 while sub-accounts to 3,450 (3,445). The corresponding figure at the beginning of the month was 1,100 and 3,389 respectively.