Signs of Black Friday for the markets

It was a virtual carnage across the global markets as they remained rocked by the intensified concern regarding the spreading of Coronavirus. On the Wall Street, Dow plunged 1,100 points on Thursday with even the tech-heavy Nasdaq not being spread. Indian markets are likely to remain under pressure and markets fear a ‘Black Friday’. Hence, we would advise traders to stay as light as possible since the weekend is likely to be wild with all the news flows. SGX Nifty is at gigantic 228 points down from the previous close trading below 11,400 mark. For the day, apart from Coronavirus, the market participants will track GDP number for the quarter-ended December 2019 which is due to release later in the day.

Asian markets is in a sea of red on Friday as the fears of global spread of virus keep the market participants on tenterhooks while, the traders prefer to remain light over the weekend. Japan’s Nikkei 225 is down by a staggering 3.48 per cent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng has slipped 2.41 per cent and China’s Shanghai Composite dropped 2.28 per cent.

Back home, the market continued their downtrend for the fifth consecutive session on the expiry day on Thursday. However, in the second half of the session, there was a short-covering rally which helped indices to pare some of its losses. At the end, Nifty ended 0.39 per cent at 11,633 and BSE Sensex closed down by 0.36 per cent at 39,746. The dismal show by the broader markets continued with Nifty Mid-cap and Small-cap dropping 0.82 per cent and 1.33 per cent, respectively, thereby underperforming the benchmark indices. On the sectoral front, barring Nifty Pharma and Nifty FMCG, all other sectors ended in red. Nifty Realty, Nifty Media and Nifty PSU Bank were the top losers.

In overnight developments, US stocks experience another day of steep losses after Coronavirus concern were stirred up by the first case in US from an unknown origin and could be the first instance of community spread of the virus in US. Further, to make matter worse, Goldman Sachs also predicted zero per cent earnings growth in 2020 for US firms, as well as possible declines. Dow plummeted 4.4 per cent, Nasdaq tank 4.6 per cent and S&P 500 fell 4.4 per cent. European indices too tumbled on Thursday.