Know more about Nifty winners & losers post lockdown

On March 24, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had declared a 21-day countrywide lockdown to break the chain of transmission of the novel coronavirus pandemic. This action was the first of its kind in Indian history and the lockdown has been in place since then with a few relaxations given recently.
We have analysed the absolute returns given by the Nifty stocks since the start of the lockdown till May 19, 2020. We calculated the absolute change in prices in percentage terms of the Nifty stocks from March 25 to May 19, taking the closing price of the two dates. While we might think that the data will show negative returns only, we have actually seen some positive results too.

Out of the total 50 stocks, 34 have shown an increase in prices while the remaining 16 have given a negative return. The best performing stock has been Cipla Limited with an absolute return of 58 per cent, followed by Bharti Infratel limited (48 per cent), Vedanta Limited (40 per cent) & Bharti Airtel (40 per cent) and Mahindra & Mahindra Limited (38 per cent).

The top losers include Bajaj Finance limited, SBI and Kotak Mahindra Bank. Bajaj Finance Limited gave the worst returns of -24 per cent, followed by SBI (-20 per cent), Kotak Mahindra Bank (-12 per cent), Eicher Motors (-11 per cent) and Indian Oil corporation Limited (-7 per cent).

Nifty, as an index, gave a return of 7 per cent in this period (considering the closing values on March 25, 2020 and May 19, 2020). Even with the majority stocks (34) giving positive returns of which 16 stocks have given returns equal to or greater than 20 per cent, the index has not performed that well because Nifty is a free float market cap weighted index which gives more weight to larger market cap stocks. This has resulted in Nifty performing more closely to the heavy weights.