Tuesday, December 21 2004 11:22 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Mumbai: The Sensex touched all-time high during morning trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) today (Dec 21, 2004) in line with fresh rally in blue-chip counters on sustained buying by foreign funds.

The BSE-30 share sensitive index opened strong at 6429.25 as against yesterday's close of 6403.00 and rallied further to a new peak of 6444.55 before being quoted at 6433.13 at 10.45 AM, up by 30.13 points.

Some of the pharma shares continued their northward journey on investment buying by institutional investors.

Top heavyweight and petro-chem giant Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) attracted heavy buying on news that the board of the company would meet on December 27 to consider a buyback of shares.

Continued Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) buying, despite earlier expectations that inflows of FIIs would slow down due to forthcoming Christmas holidays, mainly kept the tempo upbeat, dealers said.

Shares from index family like ACC, Bajaj Auto, Bharti Tele, Cipla, Dr Reddy, Hero Honda, Hindalco, HPCL, ICICI Bank, Infosys, ITC, Ranbaxy, REL, SBI, Tata Motors and Zee Tele were quoted remarkably higher on good buying support.

Among top gainers, National Fert was quoted up by 5.21 per cent, United Phosp by 4.52 per cent, JB Chemical by 3.87 per cent, Abbott by 3.66 per cent and Adani Export by 3.48 per cent.

However, ING Vysya Bank, Maharashtra Seamless, SCI, Kotak Bank and Finolex Cable showed moderate falls.