India Insight

The BSE Sensex ended above the 20,000 mark on Friday after gaining 2.6 percent in the last five trading sessions. The index has now risen for four straight weeks. Here are the top five Sensex gainers and losers of the week:

GAINERS

Tata Motors: The automaker’s stock surged 8.15 percent in the week ending May 10, making it the best Sensex performer. Though the stock is still flat in 2013, it has gained nearly 15 percent since April. However, Ambareesh Baliga of Edelweiss Financial Services advises caution: “Tata Motors’ overdependence on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) to negate the Indian underperformance makes it a risky investment at this juncture especially in view of lower margins at JLR”

Hindalco: Shares of India’s largest aluminium producer surged 8 percent this week. The stock extended gains throughout the week after rising 3.5 percent on Monday, on expectations of better realizations after copper prices rose more than 6 percent last Friday.

ITC: Shares in India’s biggest cigarette maker ended the week with gains of 6.7 percent, after touching an all-time high on Friday. Investors have placed long positions in ITC futures, indicating they expect gains to continue.

Hero MotoCorp: This was another auto stock which was among the top five performers, gaining 5.9 percent for the week to end at 1705 rupees. The stock had fallen to 1434 rupees on April 15, but has gained nearly 19 percent since then. The company reported better-than-expected results in the last week of April, but sales growth has slowed amid rising competition, denting its market share.

It may end up sounding like a famous ball-point pen maker, but an argument is being made that Goldman Sach's famous marketing device, the BRICs, should really be the BICs. Does Russia really deserve to be a BRIC, asks Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an article for Foreign Policy.

Åslund, who is also co-author with Andrew Kuchins of "The Russian Balance Sheet", reckons the Russia of Putin and Medvedev is just not worthy of inclusion alongside Brazil, India and China  in the list of blue-chip economic powerhouses. He writes:

The country's economic performance has plummeted to such a dismal level that one must ask whether it is entitled to have any say at all on the global economy, compared with the other, more functional members of its cohort.

The world of equities seems to have opted for a bargain-basement sale. The BSE Sensex which scaled the dizzy heights of 21,000 points in January 2008 is today testing 10,000 and nobody is sure if the bottom has been found.

“Nowhere in the world are we close to a bottom. Put your money in a safe bank at 9 pct and forget about the stock market for the next two years,” Shankar Sharma, Joint Managing Director of First Global, told Reuters.

If that’s the case, one wonders if the response pattern will change to the Reuters Money question – Where do you see the Sensex by Diwali??