MUMBAI, Mar 9: Bulls charged ahead with renewed vigour on the stock markets as hopes of a stable government led by BJP strengthened further. Thanks to the hectic speculative buying, Sensex shot up by nearly 99 points and crossed the 3,800 mark on BSE.Other stock exchanges in Calcutta, Delhi and Madras also made good gains. The Nifty index of the National Stock Exchange moved up to 1099.50 showing a net gain of 18.05 points. Sensex finally closed at 3,807.21 registering a net gain of 98.63 points Market circles attributed the rally to the growing belief that the BJP party is in a position to form the government at the Centre. Besides, expectations of market-friendly leaders like Jaswant Singh or L K Advani becoming the next finance minister also prompted bulls to retain their hold. The high backwardation charges also pushed up prices in several counters.The stock rally on the NSE led to 99 scrips hitting the circuit breaker (the upper end of the price bands). Hectic buying in counters like BPL, CochinRefineries, Corporation Bank, LML, ITC, Nestle, Pentafour Software, SmithKline Consumer, Nedungadi Bank and Raasi Cement saw their stocks touching new 52-week high levels.Reliance Industries was the star performer of the day. The stock registered a record volume of 1.44 crore shares on the BSE. According to market sources, after October 97 (following the announcement of a liberal bonus issue) this is the second time when the scrip has recorded a volume of over 1 crore shares. On the NSE also the scrip accounted for a huge turnover of over Rs 330 crore. However, market participants failed to explain the logic behind the continuous attempts made by the speculators. On the BSE, the stock touched an intra-day's high of Rs 180, a sharp gain of over 9%. The scrip registered a gain of 9.08% on the NSE to close at Rs 180.80. Oppenheimer and Capital International were rumoured to have placed huge buy orders at the counter.
