Mark Focus Market Support

Buoyed by a positive trend across most sectors and continued rally in metal stocks, domestic share indices started the session on a positive note.  the BSE Sensex was trading at 33,850, up 56 points, while the Nifty50 was ruling at 10,455, up 11 points. Metal stocks continued to gain on the back of rising global commodity prices. The Nifty Metal Index rose 0.5% in early trade, led by over 1% gains in shares of Vedanta and Welspun Corp. Shares of Tata Motors, which fell 1%, were the worst hit on Nifty50 as the company reported a 9.4% on-year fall in Jaguar Land Rover sales in the US to 11,394 units for December. Shares of SJVN soared over 15% to a lifetime high after the company said its board will meet on Monday to consider a proposal to buyback its fully-paid up equity shares. Barring the Nifty Auto Index, which fell 0.2% all other sectoral indices were 0.1-0.6% higher in early trade. The BSE Mid-cap and BSE Small-cap indices were up 0.60% and 0.41%, respectively. ...

Oil prices were stable on Wednesday, not far off mid-2015 highs reached the previous session, as strong demand and ongoing efforts led by OPEC and Russia to curb production tightened the market. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $60.40 a barrel at 0141 GMT, up 3 cents from their last close, and not far off the $60.74 June 2015 high reached the previous day.    Brent crude futures - the international benchmark for oil prices - were at $66.55 a barrel, down 2 cents but still not far off the $67.29 May 2015 high from the previous day. Despite this, there were indicators that markets had overshot in the last days of 2017 and trading this year, as U.S. production is set to rise further and doubts are emerging about whether demand growth can continue at current levels. Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Denmark's Saxo Bank warned that "multiple but temporary supply disruptions" like the North Sea Forties and Libyan pipeline outages (and)...