Long-term trend appears bullish

Since the Indian stock markets had turned weak in the later half the previous week, they were not expected to commence the new week on a positive note.

But what they did was quite contrary to the general expectations. They did open the new week with a bang and thereafter continued to rise in the following three consecutive trading sessions, though in varying magnitudes and proportions.

Even then the BSE benchmarking indice, the BSE Sensex for 30 scrips, jumped by a whopping 710 points when compared with the previous week's closing.

Not only that, it once again, and after a long time, crossed the 28K mark, though only marginally and momentarily as no sooner it scaled to a high of the increased offerings by bull operators themselves pushed it back and below the 28K level.

The premier market barometer slipped below this psychological number and closed at 27,837, a level that still was up by 710 points from the previous week's end level of 27,127.

Thus, the Indian stock markets performed extremely bullish during the week that was. But, they were not the only ones to have performed so.

Many other global markets, too, shone up and closed higher this week with a few of them even soaring to their life-time new highs. The European stock markets that had been mauled by the Brexit outcome, met with a completely changed market action wherein there were more buyers than sellers against more sellers and a few buyers a couple of weeks ago.

The reversal in the demand-supply quantums then helped their markets notch moderate-to-handsome gains. The Asian and the US peers, too, ran up moderate-to-handsome gains on hopes of fresh economic aid packages from their respective central banks.

The BSE Sensex on Monday opened with a bullish gap against its previous closing and immediately after opening, started to soaring towards the 28K mark level.

The Sensex on Monday opened at 27,358, against its previous close of 27,127 and then shot up to a high of 27,647 to have closed at 27,627, up by 500 points on day one of the week.

The bullish start of the week then led the market gauge to attain another 181 points' gain on Tuesday, thus taking the total gain in the first two sessions to 681 points. On Wednesday, however, the markets could rise only seven points as most of the early buyers of equities preferred to book profits, though only partially.

In the meantime, the new corporate numbers season progressed well and a few more companies came out with positive numbers. But, the markets got fresh upward push only when TCS, the IT major, came out with exciting numbers and helped the markets regain poise as the Sensex that day jumped by 127 points.

The uptrend continued to dominate the markets in early trades on Friday, sending the Sensex to a dizzy height of 28,049 but that turned out to be only a momentary event as from the very next second, the markets started to a beating retreat.

And, when another IT major Infosys Technologies came out with its "poor" second quarter results with a "weak guidance" for the future working the prices of IT companies started to falling fast with Infosys leading the pack.

It was, therefore, due to this reason that the markets not only broke the sustained winning streak but also suffered wide spread losses. The BSE Sensex closed the day with a loss for the first time in the last week.

The markets are expected to adhere to their uptrend in the near future and also in the long-run. The macro-economic indicators are showing steady improvement in the Indian as well as other leading economies like the US and a few European nations including the UK.

The government has also expressed that the GST Bill is most likely to get cleared in the monsoon session of the Parliament commencing today. The monsoon rains are quite satisfactory this year so far and the statistics suggest that the sowing season is progressing in full swing.

The US stock markets on Friday closed at new highs and notched handsome gains on a few data that represent economic activities there. Also, Reliance Industries came out with much improved performance for the second quarter on Friday evening after the markets had closed down for the day and the week.

The exceedingly good performance as churned out by Reliance Industries, a heavy-weight on the BSE and other leading indices, is sure to take its share up when the markets re-open today for the new week and also help others to perform bullish on the stock bourses.

So, the short-term outlook for the Indian stock markets continues to be positive and with the revival in economic activities in India as well as other leading nations, the long-term outlook for the Indian stock markets appears to be even more bullish.

The medium-term trend may not look equally positive as it is this period during which many untoward incidents that might happen and mar the market sentiments.

Therefore, those who are interested more in speculative gains may go in for buying momentum stocks that are seen going up more frequently these days, whereas the long-term investors may chose fundamentally strong and leading companies whose long-term future outlook is bright.

In any rising markets, penny stocks deliver the best rewards to their early lifters but they are extremely dangerous too. If not disposed off in time, these remain with their pickers for life-time with their values vanishing to zeros.