India Going Strong

Today U.S. stocks ended higher (Dow Jones Industrial Average ended at 11317) as stabilizing long-term interest rates, strong Morgan Stanley earnings and a labor deal at General Motors Corp. lifted the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its best level in nearly 5 years.

It is also noteworthy in these days of global investment strategy that only yesterday at the opposite end of the world the Indian Stock Exchange benchmark Sensex also touched an all-time high of 11,001.

India is enjoying a great bull market for quite some time now. It only took 29 trading sessions to reach the 11,000-mark from 10,000 level, the shortest possible time for covering 1,000 points. Positive budget proposals, robust economic growth, expectations of higher than 8% GDP growth and last but not the least, first roadmap to be announced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI - equivalent of our Fed) on capital account convertibility by July'2006, cleared the decks for the Sensex to cross the 11,000-mark.

The unprecedented bull run started on May 6, 2003 when the Sensex was at 3,001.21 level. In took just 67 trading sessions to cross the 4,000 mark and touch 4,026.27 points on August 19, 2003. We covered the timeline on the rise of the Sensex through Indian stock market history in our past posting of November 29, 2005 when Sensex touched 9000 mark. The Sensex reached the 10K-mark on February 7, 2006 -- within about 2 months and 1 week.

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Sensex comprises of these 30 stocks: ACC, Bajaj Auto, Bharti Tele, BHEL, Cipla, Dr Reddy's (RDY), Gujarat Ambuja, Grasim, HDFC, HDFC Bank (HDB), Hero Honda, Hindalco, HLL, ICICI Bank (IBN), Infosys (INFY), ITC, L&T, Maruti, NTPC, ONGC, Ranbaxy, Reliance, Reliance Energy, Satyam, SBI, Tata Motors (TTM), Tata Power, Tata Steel, TCS, and Wipro (WIT).

The Companies with names in red ink are traded in USA as American Deposit Receipt (ADR). All of them had great performance since their launch in US market.