Monday, July 11 2005 13:35 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Mumbai: The Sensex today (July 11, 2005) opened strong and continued to rally on increased heavy buying, mainly by foreign funds and was quoted 79.53 points higher during the early trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).

The BSE benchmark 30-share sensitive index opened sharply higher at 7227.51 as against the previous close of 7212.08 and shot up further on persistent heavy buying to touch a high of 7293.37.

Later, the index was quoted at 7291.61 at 10.30 am, revealing a handsome gain of 79.53 points over the last weekend close.

Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which had recorded net purchases at Rs 1684.5 crore (US $ 387 million) in equities for the trading week ended July eight, continued to buy heavily after a steep rise in US stocks, a broker said.

At the Wall Street, Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up by 146.85 points to 10,449.14 and the Nasdaq Compositive Index by 37.22 points to 2112.88, he said.

During the early trading, ACC, Bajaj Auto, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), Dr Reddy, Grasim, HDFC, HDFC Bank, Hero Honda, Hindalco, L&T, ONGC, Tata Motors, TCS, Wipro, Bharti, Cipla, GACL, Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), Infosys Tech, REL, Maruti, NTPC, Ranbaxy, Satyam Comp, State Bank India (SBI), Tata Power and Tata Steel were firm on heavy buying.

However, Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) and Indian Tobacco Company (ITC) were trading lower on lack of support.