The markets are trading extremely strong with impressive breadth. Capital goods, power, banking, realty and metals stocks are trading with significant gains.

At 11:00, the Sensex is up 444.23 points or 2.36% at 19297.10, and the Nifty up 137.85 points or 2.46% at 5746.45. About 2260 shares have advanced, 742 shares declined, and 74 shares are unchanged.

Top gainers on the Nifty are HDFC Bank at Rs 1,653 up 5.78%, Unitech at Rs 356.65 up 5.10% and HPCL at Rs 291.30 up 5.09%.

The only loser on the Nifty was Hero Honda at Rs 709 down 0.75%.

Most active shares on NSE are Reliance Petro at Rs 215.90 with 16,316,023 shares, Reliance at Rs 2,877.25 with 746,854 shares and Jindal Steel at Rs 12,790 with 113,515 shares.

BSE metal index was trading very strong with over 3.5% gain. major gainers in this counter were Jindal Steel, Nalco, Jindal Saw and Sterlite Inds.

In the realty space, the top gainers were Anant Raj Inds, Unitech, Ansal Properties and DLF.

IT stocks are attracting some attention on the back of marginal depreciation of rupee against dollar. Major gainers in the sector were TCS, Patni Comp, Satyam and Wipro.

Mkts open with gap up on strong global cues

The markets opened with huge gap up today on strong cues from the global markets. Heavy buying was seen in the banking, cap good, and power stocks in the early trade. Empee Distilleries got listed on the bourses today atRs 440 versus its issue price of Rs 400.

At 9:56 am, Sensex was up 376 points at 19230 and Nifty was up 113 points at 5722. Major gainers in the early trade were Rel Energy, RIL, L&T, ICICI Bank, NTPC, Unitech, HDFC Bank, DLF, ONGC, PNB, L&T and SBI.

Asian markets advanced today. Hong Kong's Hang Seng surged 3.25% or 863.33 points at 27,404.42, Japan's Nikkei gained 1.31% or 195.34 points at 15,084.11, Taiwan's Taiwan Weighted advanced 1.86% or 155.40 points at 8,497.60, Singapore's Straits Times rose 2.21% or 73.42 points at 3,399.31 and South Korea's Seoul Composite was up 3.06% or 54.20 points at 1,827.08