By Hritam Mukherjee
(Reuters) -Indian shares snapped a three-day losing streak on Friday as gains in Axis Bank lifted heavyweight financials, although foreign fund outflows dragged down the benchmarks to a third weekly loss.
The Nifty 50 index closed 0.42% higher to 24,854.05 points as of 3:30 p.m. IST, after hitting a two-month low earlier in the session, while the S&P BSE Sensex added 0.27% to 81,224.75.
The benchmarks were down 0.44% and 0.19%, respectively, for the third consecutive week, due to largely disappointing corporate earnings and foreign investors exiting the Indian market.
On the day, however, Axis Bank rose 5.7% after topping quarterly profit expectations. This lifted private banks by 2% to their best day in more than three months.
“Gains in private banks lifted market morale on expectations that upcoming bank earnings from HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank will be strong, following suit of Axis Bank,” Saurabh Jain, assistant vice president of research of retail equities at SMC Global Securities, said.
On the flip side, losses in Infosys and LTIMindtree weighed on the IT index, which fell about 1.5% after their results suggested a broad-based recovery in global tech spending was yet to take hold.
The theme for the week, besides lacklustre earnings, was an exodus of foreign funds from India as they shifted focus to China.
Foreign institutional investors have pulled out $8.4 billion so far in October, already set for the highest monthly outflows on record. That after assets under custody of foreign portfolio investors topped $1 trillion, as of September-end.
Among individual stocks, gold lender Manappuram Finance tanked 13.6% after the central bank barred one of its units from issuing fresh loans, citing a breach of norms. ($1 = 84.0600 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Hritam Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza, Abinaya Vijayaraghavan and Sonia Cheema)
