After snapping a four-day winning streak on Wednesday, domestic benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty ended 1.6% down. Nifty at one point during the day climbed to as high as 10,553 mark but failed to sustain the gains, ending down 10,305 points. “Given the sharp rally over the last few days, the market may take a breather over here and consolidate for some time. Investors would track global cues and development around coronavirus cases along with the geo-political tensions for any directional move. We would advise investors to stay cautious and focus more on stock-specific action,” said Siddhartha Khemka, Head – Retail Research, Motilal Oswal.

Equity markets might again witness a weaker trading session as SGX Nifty indicated a gap-down opening after being down over 100 points on Thursday morning. Stock markets are also expected to take note of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) projection of a sharp contraction in India’s economic growth in 2020. The IMF has said that India’s economy will contract by 4.5% during the year, which will be historic low, owing to the coronavirus pandemic.

Technical View:
“Positive sequence of higher tops and bottoms continued on the daily chart and today’s high of 10552 could now be considered as a new higher top of the sequence. Hence, there is a possibility of some more weakness in the short term. The short term trend of Nifty is negative. One may expect further declines down to 10200-10150 levels in the next couple of sessions. Immediate resistance to be watched at 10425 levels,” said Nagaraj Shetti, Technical Research Analyst, HDFC Securities

Results today:
Among the companies that are expected to announce their March quarter earnings today are; Apollo Hospital Enterprise Ltd, Ashok Leyland, Bank of India, Container Corporation of India, Hindustan Aeronautics, Indian Overseas Bank, TTK Prestige, and Varroc Engineering Ltd, among others.

Asian markets:
Asian peers slipped with Nikkei 225 down 1.38%, Hang Seng slipped 0.50%. The weaker sentiment across Asian stock markets, analysts said, was owing to the growing number of coronavirus cases, clubbed with international trade tensions and the IMF’s downgrade. The IMF said it expects a deeper global recession, with output shrinking 4.9% in 2020.

US stock markets:
The fear of another wave of new coronavirus cases did not leave the US equity markets. S&P 500 was down 2.6% while Dow Jones and NASDAQ too showed weakness slipped over 2% each.