Nifty's eight-week slide leaves Monday's open under a 5.3 percent US yield

Indian equities go into Monday's session on the back of an eight-week losing run, the longest for the Nifty since 2001. The index closed Thursday at 22,421.95, down 198.5 points, or about 0.88 percent. The Sensex closed at 71,909.70 after a weekly drop of 1,670.84 points. Livemint put the Nifty's weekly fall at more than 3 percent. The BSE's total market value fell below 467 lakh crore on Thursday after a session that wiped about 5 lakh crore, the Economic Times reported.

The Thursday path was a sell-off and a partial pullback, not a one-way close. CNBC-TV18 said the Nifty fell through most of the session and then recovered nearly 195 points from the intraday low, and still finished down 0.88 percent. Bank Nifty closed at 54,450.75, down 0.33 percent on the day and 2.03 percent on the week, a sixth straight weekly decline for that index. The Sensex touched a 52-week low during the session. The Nifty's eight-week streak is now longer than the seven-week slide in the Covid sell-off.

The external number sitting on top of the open is the US Treasury yield. CNBC-TV18 said the 10-year yield has climbed past its 2007 peak to 5.3 percent, the highest since April 2002, and the 30-year to 5.6 percent. With the Nifty's earnings yield below the return on US government debt, the same note said a lasting recovery is hard to argue until yields settle, crude eases and foreign selling slows. Crude was described as firm. Foreign portfolio investors have been net sellers through the slide. A precise week-by-week FPI figure was not in the Thursday close reports used here.

Monday is not a data-free session. The triggers traders listed for the week are the Reserve Bank's policy meeting, a GST Council sitting, and the start of the results season. Support that dealers are watching on the Nifty is 22,200. That level is about 222 points, or roughly 1 percent, under Thursday's close. It is a chart reference, not a forecast.

Single stocks will take their own headlines. HDFC Bank's board, after RBI approval on 1 October, named Anup Bagchi managing director and chief executive from 27 October, for three years, and made him an additional director from 2 October. Sashidhar Jagdishan leaves at the close of business on 26 October. Yes Bank, RVNL, Bajaj Finance, DLF and IDBI Bank were on Livemint's list of names in focus for Monday's open. The index, not those names, is what has fallen for eight weeks.

The comparison with 2001 is the cleanest domestic marker. A streak of that length has not been a routine correction. It has also not, on the published closes, been a crash week. The Sensex lost 1.52 percent on the Monday of the week that just ended, then smaller amounts, then 0.79 percent on Thursday, Livemint reported. The damage is the accumulation: eight down weeks, a 52-week low, and a US 10-year yield at a 2002 high.

What Monday can change is the weekly count. A positive close would end the streak at eight. It would not retire the yield gap CNBC-TV18 described, or the foreign selling, or the crude price. Those are the inputs the cash market will mark at 9:15 a.m. The 22,200 level is the nearby line under 22,421.95. The RBI decision, later in the week, is the domestic event that can move the rate-sensitive part of the same tape.