The Sensex and Nifty are on a steady uptrend. Would they surprise us on the upside?

The recovery in the Asian stock markets boosted investor sentiments in India, leading to a higher opening today. A surge in the advance tax payments for the fourth quarter also aided the gains. Oil & gas and metal counters witnessed good demand in morning trade with the boarder markets also joining the rally.

The indices touched their day's highs in post-noon trade. But news of the suicide of former telecom minister A Raja's aide Sadiq Batcha pressurised the market a bit in the last half an hour with the benchmarks paring some of the gains, but making a close in the green.

The Sensex and Nifty, after opening with a positive gap at 18,264 and 5,476, were able to maintain an uptrend. Overall, the good performance of the Asian indices helped the Indian market, as well. The day's opening was the intra-day low, too. Each dip and rise during the day was at a higher level.

Ultimately in the post-noon session, the market hit its intra-day high after which it fell. The intra-day highs were 18,444 and 5,535, respectively. The Sensex closed 191 points up at 18,359 while Nifty was up 62 points up at 5,511. The advance-decline ratio on the National Stock Exchange was positive at 1141:554. The market is slowly turning up, ignoring the negatives.

The gainers outnumbered the losers on the key benchmarks, as the Sensex closed with 24 advancing stocks and six declining stocks whereas the Nifty retired with 42 stocks in the green, six in the red while two stocks remained unchanged. Among the broader markets, the BSE Mid-cap index gained 1.37% and the BSE Small-cap index advanced 1.216%.

All sectoral indices closed in the positive zone. The BSE Realty index (up 2.47%) was the top gainer. It was followed by BSE Bankex (up 2.15%), BSE Consumer Durables (up 1.90%), BSE Public Sector Undertaking (up 1.47%) and BSE Healthcare (up 1.41%).

Reliance Infrastructure (up 5.17%), State Bank of India (3.10%), ICICI Bank (up 3.03%), DLF (up 2.44%) and TCS (up 2.36%) were the top gainers on the Sensex. On the other hand, Hindustan Unilever (down 1.15%), Hindalco Industries (down 0.56%) and Cipla (down 0.52%) were the top losers.

The Nikkei 225 that lost over 11% yesterday, its biggest one-day fall since October 2008, recouped nearly half those losses today. The gains also helped other markets in the region to close on a positive note as investors resorted to bargain-hunting after the three-day decline. Global investment firm Goldman Sachs Group opined that the effects of 11th March earthquake and tsunami on the Japanese economy would be temporary.

The Shanghai Composite gained 1.20%, the Hang Seng added 0.10%, the Jakarta Composite rose 0.20%, the KLSE Composite advanced 0.56%, the Nikkei 225 jumped 5.68%, the Straits Times was up 0.85%, the Seoul Composite surged 1.77% and the Taiwan Weighted was 1.09% higher in trade today.

Back home, institutional investors-both foreign as well as domestic-were net buyers of stocks yesterday. While foreign institutional investors pumped in Rs148.28 crore, domestic institutional investors pooled in Rs567.10 crore.

GEI Industrial Systems (up 2.27%) has secured orders collectively worth Rs 45 crore from leading Indian companies in the cement and steel sector. It has bagged an order from UltraTech Cement for supplying of air cooled vacuum steam condensers for the latter's captive power plants being set up in Andhra Pradesh.

GEI has also secured two orders from Top Worth Group companies-Top Worth Urja and Metal and Crest Steel and Power-for supply to captive power plants being set up at Nagpur in Maharashtra and Durg in Chhattisgarh, respectively.

Brahmaputra Infraproject (down 2.55%) has bagged an order worth Rs184 crore from Reliance Utility Engineers. The contract is for six-laning of the Pune-Satara Road (NH-4), Package 2B.

Kirloskar Pneumatic Company (up 3.09%) has inked an agreement with Northern Railway for haulage of RoadRailer trains, including a pilot project between Delhi and Chennai. The agreement is a continuation of the memorandum of understanding signed by the company with the Indian Railways in January 2008.

RoadRailer is a bi-modal transport system, which facilitate transport of white goods from one destination to other by road as well as rail using the same vehicle. For this purpose, the company already obtained and developed necessary technology from US-based company for manufacturing RoadRailer.