ONGC posted its biggest single-day fall in a year on Thursday as oil & gas stocks slipped 1-6% after the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on Wednesday decided to defer the gas price hike by another three months.

Hiking gas price would require further discussion, said oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan after market hours on Wednesday. “The whole issue as well as the guidelines (for the price hike) requires a comprehensive discussion. We will have a dialogue with all stakeholders. There is a need to take care of public interest,: Pradhan added.

We reiterate our ‘buy’ rating on Axis Bank and raise our target price to R2,200 (earlier R2,120) as well as upgrade our earnings by 2%/4% for FY15/16. At our target price, the stock will trade at 2x FY16e P/BV. We expect EPS CAGR of 18% over FY14-17, with RoEs at 18% and RoAs ~1.8%.

At a recent meeting, we find increased confidence in the management on various parameters, even as nothing much has changed on the ground level yet. It remains confident about 3-5% higher-than-industry growth and new stressed assets at R6,500 crore with a positive bias and specific credit costs at 75-80 bps.

Shares of GVK Power & Infrastructure Ltd today gained ground after the company said it is exploring options to reduce its debt by equity sale in some of its businesses.

The stock was up 1.4 per cent at Rs 18.65 in the mid-day trade after rising to as high as Rs 19 in the morning trade at the BSE.

Amazon's Asia unit will provide back-end support in a venture with an Indian private investment firm formed by Infosys Ltd co-founder NR Narayana Murthy that aims to help get Indian companies online.

Catamaran Ventures's partnership with Amazon Asia will target small and medium-sized firms, Arjun Ramegowda Narayanswamy, who heads the private investment company, said in an email to Reuters on Friday.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) last month's move to reschedule the premium that developers of road projects have to pay to the government for securing the right to build and operate them will facilitate faster completion of the beleaguered projects and help companies service the debt associated with them.

Indian software companies gain as a better-than-expected rise in quarterly revenue by Accenture Plc sparks hopes of a robust demand environment, dealers say.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd up 2.7%, Infosys gains 1.4%, Wipro up 1.9%, HCL Technologies rises 3.3% and Tech Mahindra surges 2.3%.

Markets have come off morning highs as weakness in counters like ICICI Bank, Bharti Airtel and M&M weighed on the indices. At 1130 hrs, the Sensex was up 80 points at 25,143 and the Nifty was up 22 points to trade at 7,514.

In the broader markets, the smallcap index surged 0.6% and the midcap index was up 0.4%, both outperforming the Sensex which was up 0.3%.

The Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) on Thursday said it would deliver its order on an insider trading case involving Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) on Monday.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has been probing charges of insider trading against RIL in a matter dating back to 2007. Allegedly, the company took positions in Reliance Petroleum on the back of price-sensitive information about its merger with RIL, making profits by trading on information not available to the public.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has pulled up the mutual fund (MF) sector for not complying with the ‘20-25’ minimum exposure norm and for misuse of funds meant for investor awareness programmes.

By Sebi norms, any MF scheme is required to have at least 20 investors, with each owning less than 25 per cent of the assets. However, U K Sinha, chairman of Sebi, said on Thursday that several MF schemes were in violation of this norm, with investor concentration in some schemes as high as 98 per cent.

Owing to the all-round rally after the election results, most stocks are trading at rich valuations. Surprisingly, however, some prominent stocks haven’t participated in this rally— between May 16 and June 25, ITC, United Breweries, Adani Enterprises, Bank of Baroda (BoB) and Idea Cellular (Idea) were the top losers among BSE 100 stocks. Three of these—ITC, BoB and Idea — are among the top picks of brokerages and, therefore, offer a buying opportunity.

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