4 Reasons The Sensex Plunged 800 Points In Trade
The Sensex today plunged in trade, with the benchmark index falling a huge 800 points, while the Nifty nosedived 252 points in trade. Stocks like Bajaj Auto saw a huge fall of 8 per cent, while other prominent losers included the likes of ONGC, Maruti Suzuki, India Oil and Grasim. Here are 4 reasons for the sharp fall in the markets.
Morgan Stanley downgrades global equities
Morgan Stanley in a recent report downgraded global equities from equal-weight to underweight as the upside remains fairly limited from current levels.
Over the next 12 months, it is believed that there is just 1 percent average upside to Morgan Stanley's price targets for the S&P 500, MSCI Europe, MSCI EM, and Topix Japan.
"We think a repeated lesson for stocks over the last 30 years has been that when easier policy collides with weaker growth, the latter usually matters more for returns. Easing has worked best when accompanied by improving data," the global investment bank said in a note.
Budget proposals
Some of the Union Budget proposals do not favour market momentum. For example, a Budget proposal to increase minimum public shareholding of listed companies to 35 per cent from 25 per cent, will mean a lot of money will be sucked out, in order to adhere to or comply to this requirement.
If the proposals are to be implemented in the next 18 months or so, we might see a large amount of off loading, which might take place. This was one of the reasons that spooked the markets in trade and the indices dived.
Strong jobs data
Job growth in the United States rebounded strongly in June 2019, with government payrolls surging, the Labour Department's closely watched employment report showed on Friday, suggesting May's sharp slowdown in hiring was probably a one-off, Reuters reported.
The jobs data, which came in at 224,000, has dashed hopes of aggressive rate cuts by the US Fed as was anticipated earlier. A cut in interest rates is good for the stock markets, as money moves from debt to equities.
The number of jobs added was also the higher in 5 months.
Sell-off across the Asian markets
Asian markets, like the Shanghai Composite also saw a sell-off. What was interesting about today's market was that some heavyweight stocks like HDFC Bank and HDFC contributed to the fall. The largest fall came in the shares of Hero Motor Corp, which plunged as much as 4 per cent, led by L&T. From the Nifty, the Bajaj twins saw massive falls. Both these companies, did not have too much by way of proposals in the Union Budget.
Markets are expected to remain increasingly volatile going ahead. At lower levels, there maybe some buying opportunity for investors.