No fear, bulls want more

MUMBAI: Whenever the sensex touches a new peak, a big round number, there is excitement laced with fear. Will the market move up from here or will it spur a sell-off? On Friday, the sensex touched 15,000 and surprisingly, on Dalal Street the mood is quite unlike what it used to be during its previous highs. There is no fear. Only confidence.
There is proof that the sensex is not growing as fast as it once did — the last 1,000 points took 145 trading sessions — the longest since the start of the current bull run.Yet, the sensex steamed its way ahead on the face of a falling dollar, increasing interest rates and inflation. Investors put aside strong warning signals from the US and Japan to buy more stock in emerging markets like India and China.
Local investors too subscribed to giant initial public offers (IPO) that sucked out thousands of crores of small savings. Says Sankar Sharma, director, Mumbai-based broking firm First Global: "We haven’t seen the best yet. The undertone is very bullish."
The sensex crossed 14,000 last December and continued to rise until February. But it fell sharply to 12,500 levels by March as the Reserve Bank of India suggested measures to cool down the economy. The market once again started rising as companies started publishing good annual results for the period ended March 2007. For a while, doubts about the prospects for Indian companies vanished and since then the sensex has risen 17%.