Mumbai: After an overnight brief pause, the market once again, rallied smartly lifting the Sensex by 58 points at close on a fresh bout of buying spree from investors despite worries over higher rate of inflation and firm trend in international crude prices.

Overcoming early pressure, the BSE (Bombay Sock Exchange) Benchmark 30-share Index gradually moved upwards to four-month high at 5483.59 before ending the day at 5477.68 as against yesterday's (Sep 15, 2004) close of 5420.09, a net gain of 57.59 points or 1.06 per cent.

Crediting the strong trend in select blue chip counters to sustained positive FII inflow, brokers said though the activity was largely confined to blue chip stocks, the market still seemed to be bullish and is expected to continue uptrend unless any major negative development.

Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which remained the key driving force behind the market, were believed to have made fairly heavy purchases in ONGC, ITC and a few others.

Operators and retail investors too were seen making fresh commitments in several counters on the back of positive FII activity in the current month.

Meanwhile, New York's light sweet crude for October delivery rose to $44.15 a barrel in pre-opening electronic trading in London this afternoon.

RIL, ITC, SBI, Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Satyam Computers, Dr Reddy's Lab, Hindalco, MTNL, Ranbaxy, Tata Power, ONGC, REL HPCL, Zee Telefilms and Bajaj Auto were the prominent gainers on fresh purchases.

However, Grasim, BHEL, Cipla, HDFC and Infosys Tech showed moderate falls.