Pre-Market Report - 27.02.2008

[Sukumar]

Time to shop, ahead of budget sops
====================================================Markets look to
open strong for the third day in a row as Bulls look to come back and
regain some lost ground in the past few months. The global cues are
good with the US markets ending up and Nikkei joining the gainers
club.

Overnight the US markets fared better than expected as the bad news
from two dismal economic reports on Core whole sale prices and
consumer confidence was over come on IBM's plan of $15 billion stock
buyback, which improved the market sentiment.The Dow closed up 114
points to close the day at 12,684.92 as the Nasdaq gained 0.75 percent
at 2345.00.

On the domestic front Reliance Industries Ltd announced that it
discovered natural gas in Mahanadi and this will definitely reflect on
the stock performance today. The overall sentiment in the market has
started improving as we have seen some selective buying in some
sectors like Tea which has underperformed the market for the past 12
months. The focus has now turned to Budget 2008 which is due on
Friday, ignoring the upcoming F&O expiry. We strongly believe and are
nearly certain that Agriculture (fertilizers in particular) and
Textiles will be the two key sectors to watch out for in the upcoming
budget.

Mid cap and Small cap indices which have underperformed the index for
the last 6 sessions made a come back yesterday and are likely to
outperform the large caps in the coming days. We see a gain of 1.5 to
2 percent on BSE today with selective buying in sectors which could
gain from budget sops. Have a great day.

Market Close Box :

BSE Sensex 17806.19 155.619
NSE Nifty 5270.05 69.35
USD Rs. 40.07
Oil Nymex $98.23