Wednesday, April 20 2005 10:33 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Mumbai: The Sensex today (Apr 20, 2005) started strong on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on heavy buying activity and showed a smart gain of 72 points during the early trade.

Higher Asian advices also helped the fresh buying activity, brokers said.

The BSE Benchmark 30-share sensitive index resumed strong higher at 6169.83 and continued to rise smartly on persistent buying and touched 6214.83. The Index was quoted at 6206.44 at 10:10 hrs (IST), showing a smart recovery of 71.58 points over the previous close of 6134.86.

The market had fallen towards the fag-end yesterday (Apr 19, 2005) after an early firm trend due to emergence of selling mainly due to the lower than expected results by TCS.

Another factor for the weak close yesterday was heavy Foreign Institutional Investors (FII) selling, which had offloaded equities worth Rs 1,031 crore till Monday (Apr 18, 2005), a broker said.

The firm spots at the opening session were Tata Steel, SBI, SAIL, RIL, Infosystch, Satyam Comp, VSNL, Bharti, ONGC, Wipro, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Tata Motors, GAIL, BPCL, ZEE Tele, Ranbaxy, GACL, IPCL and OBC on good support.

However, TCS continued to remain the weak spot on persistent selling.