Week Ahead

The benchmark indices recouped all their previous week's losses and closed at the highest levels since December 2022, while the weekly gains were the highest since July 2022. The BSE Sensex rose 1,457 points or 2.44 percent to 61,112, and the Nifty50 jumped 441 points or 2.5 percent to 18,065, with buying across sectors for the week ended April 28.

The broader markets also participated in the run-up, with the Nifty Midcap 100 and Smallcap 100 indices gaining 2.3 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.

The coming truncated week is going to be action-packed for the market with all eyes on corporate earnings, monthly GST collection, auto sales numbers, PMI data globally, FOMC meet, and ECB interest rate decision. The market is likely to stay in positive territory going ahead too with main focus on the commentary by US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

As we will be entering into the fourth week of earnings season, nearly 200 companies are set to announce their quarterly numbers in the week ending May 8. So far the earnings season has been good and broadly on expected lines with strong numbers by banks and corporates indicating the worst related to margin pressure is behind, though there was weakness in select frontline IT companies.

Technically Nifty50 has formed a bullish candlestick pattern on the daily charts, and a long bullish candle on the weekly scale, recouping all the losses seen in the previous week, making higher highs formation for the fifth consecutive week.

The index closed above the psychological 18,000 mark for the first time since December 2022, decisively breaking out a downward sloping resistance trendline adjoining highs of record high in December last year and the high of the week ended April 21.

Overall trend is positive and we can see broad-based buying along with sector rotation. Nifty has managed to cross back above psychological 18,000 levels which is showing positive momentum.

The Option data also indicated 18,200-18,300 is likely to be key hurdles for the Nifty50 in coming days, with immediate supports at 17,900-17,800 levels.