It has been a remarkable couple of days leading up to the Infosys results. But today was not that special. The Sensex and Nifty have closed about a third of a percentage point down for themselves. But it oscillated quite violently today, up 50 points at one point of time and down about 70-80 points afterwards; even the broader markets did nothing special. In fact, both of those Indices actually cracked. Those are the frontline Indices and the broader market picture for you.

As a result, the advance-declines have closed to about 250 stocks in favour of the declines in trade today. So it was not a healthy close. But the turnover was all right. We have crossed about Rs 46,000 crore or thereabouts on final count on provisional closing. So that is about okay - the bulk as always, came from the futures and options, as things panned out.

On the futures side, the discount has narrowed to about 14 points. That discount has been hovering about 24-25 points or thereabouts and a lot of stocks were active today, the likes of RNRL, GMR, Tata Motors, some long positions being built and you had two stars in trade today. We saw Arvind Mills and Nagarjuna Fertilizers where you saw some covering happening. Some shorts building up in the odd banking stocks like Union Bank and State Bank of India and some unwinding in the odd IndusInd Bank and IFCI from the financial space.

But one day ahead of its results, Infosys was looking all right for the better part of the day. In fact it was up nearly 2% at one point of time, it has closed the day up 1.5%. So that should go down as a very strong approach to what would be delivered tomorrow morning.

The rest of the tech pack was relatively mixed. In fact Wipro was closing in the red today and all the others anywhere between a 0.25% and a percent up led by Satyam.

Outside that you had stocks like Hindustan Unilever and ONGC stole the show today in terms of price and volumes for these stocks. A few other winners included the likes of the auto stocks, we touched on Tata Motors on the Futures side but Maruti, M&M, all of them having a good day, as did the metals pack in fact led by SAIL and Tata Steel. Even Nalco had a very good share in terms of percentage movements for itself of about 4.5%, that’s a year-high for Nalco.

Just outside that, if you take a look at it, Suzlon was news driven from the time we got into trade this morning. That stock took it very hard in trade, 4% down, Hero Honda and Reliance Communications were some of the other stocks that chose to take the day off.

Banking as a space, HDFC Bank’s numbers actually disappointed the Streets. That didn’t go down too well and the rest of the banking pack followed suit on the frontline indices at least.

Cement as a pack also slipped just that little bit. There is so much happened with the pricing scenario and those stocks chose to take the day off anywhere between 1.5% to 2.5% for all of those stocks.

It was midcap focused today whether it was an HEG, Arvind Mills, an RNRL, GMR, all of those stocks relatively news driven in trade today but price and volumes in all of these stocks were quite remarkable and Bank of India to round off the list of winners. Just to touch on real estate as well, where we had Orbit as the star in trade today and the odd Akruti Nirman doing reasonably well for itself.

The odd losers like Roman Tarmat from the recent listings, Voltas, the odd Yes Bank, Ispat and Meghmani Organics as well from the recently listed pack that actually decided to take the day off just that little bit.

We go into Infosys results tomorrow. Let us see what the management can deliver and whether that can provide any further direction. Global cues will also actually help when we go in to trade tomorrow morning.