By Bharath Rajeswaran and Hritam Mukherjee
Indian equities showed little movement during a special trading session held on Saturday, dedicated to testing fail-safe systems for equity trading. The sessions, conducted from both primary and disaster recovery sites, aimed to assess the readiness of stock exchanges in responding to unforeseen events.
This initiative follows scrutiny by India's markets regulator of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) after a significant trading outage on February 24, 2021, due to a technical glitch. During that incident, the bourses failed to transition to the disaster recovery site.
A similar special trading session occurred on March 2, 2024.
Despite the cautious market sentiment, with the anticipation of national election results on June 4, the benchmark NSE Nifty 50 settled marginally higher at 22,502, while the S&P BSE Sensex added 0.12% to reach 74,005.94, trading within a narrow range.
Metals gained 0.53%, buoyed by China's efforts to bolster its struggling property sector. Small- and mid-cap stocks outperformed blue chips, rising by 0.82% and 0.51%, respectively.
Nestle India emerged as the top gainer in the Nifty 50, climbing 2.23% after its shareholders rejected a proposal to increase royalty payments to its Swiss parent company. Meanwhile, drug maker Zydus Lifesciences surged 5% on strong U.S. demand, lifting the pharmaceutical index by 0.67%.
Conversely, JSW Steel was the top loser in the Nifty 50, shedding 1.81% following a drop in fourth-quarter profit.
Indian markets will remain closed on Monday for a holiday, with trading set to resume on Tuesday.