About 95 percent of the BSE 500 companies have given decent returns to the investors in the past three days, as the benchmark indices have witnessed massive gains following the announcement of some positive measures in the budget for 2016-2017.
While the BSE Sensex gained over 1,500 points in the last three trading sessions ending March 3, the 50-share Nifty went up by 488 points. The rally in the indices was mainly led by the rising hopes on a rate cut by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the wake of the government's status quo on fiscal consolidation.
Presenting his third budget on Monday, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had kept the fiscal deficit target for the next fiscal year unchanged at 3.5 percent, sharply in contrast with the call by bankers and analysts that the finance minister would deviate from the fiscal discipline path to accommodate for higher government spending.
The announcement triggered heavy buying in most banking stocks, which were beaten down in the previous sessions over a sharp decline in profits for the December quarter due to higher provisioning for bad loans.
Stocks in the BSE 500 index also saw huge gains, with some of them giving more than 25 percent returns in just three days after the budget presentation.
Share price of Suven Life Sciences posted the biggest gains among the BSE 500 stocks, climbing by over 33 percent in the first three trading sessions in March. While Inox Wind was the second best performer in the index, gaining a little over 30 percent, stock prices of Delta Corp, Marksans Pharma and Hathway Cable & Datacom went up by 27 percent each.
In contrast, 25 of the BSE 500 components witnessed losses in the past three sessions, with United Spirits figuring among the list. United Spirits shares fell over six percent.
"The probability of the GST Bill getting passed in the current session of Parliament looks low and markets will now look out for reforms on the executive side," Dipen Shah, senior vice-president and head of private client group research, Kotak Securities, told the Financial Express.
