Friday, August 19 2005 13:20 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Mumbai: The Sensex today (August 19, 2005) opened better than yesterday and improved further by 41 points during early trading on the Stock Exchange, Mumbai (BSE) on fresh bouts of buying at low level.

The BSE benchmark 30-share sensitive index opened at 7817.74 as agaisnt the previous close of 7811.33 and thereafter moved in a range of 7856.44 and 7813.06, before being quoted at 7852.39 at 10.30 a.M., showing a fresh gain of 41.06 points over the last close.

Yesterday (August 18, 2005), Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) as well domestic Mutual Funds (MF) were very active at the initial stage and as a result the index had shot up to a new intra-day high of 7921.39 points in highly volatile trading. However, the index fell sharply towards the end on fresh bouts of selling by retail investors and operators.

In the first two day's of this week FIIs made a net purchase in eqnities worth Rs 173.80 crore and FM bought shares worth Rs 209.57 crore. During the month of August, FIIs buying was Rs 3420 crore and DF Rs 1310 crore.

During the early trading RIL, Satyam, Infosystch, SBI, ONGC, Maruti, Ranbaxy, Dr Reddy, Cipla, Grasim, HDFC, Hero Honda, Hindalco, ITC, L&T, REL, Tata Motors, TCS, Tata Power, ACC, Bajaj Auto, BHEL and Cipla were firm on good buying.

However, Bharti Tele, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, HLL, NTPC, Tata Steel and Wipro were weak on lack of support.