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Indian markets closed on a buoyant note on Thursday as investors shrugged off concerns about slowing growth, fears over interest rate hikes and geopolitical tensions, and kept picking up stocks, reacting to a slew of strong earnings updates. Today, the markets are likely to get flat-to-positive start as global cues remained positive overnight. Some support will come as the third quarterly employment survey (QES) by the labour ministry showed that employment in nine select non-farm sectors stood at 31.45 million in the October-December 2021 quarter, 0.39 million more than the July-September period and 0.65 million higher than April-June, 2021. Surprisingly, on Thursday, foreign portfolio investors turned net buyers of Indian equities after selling shares worth $3.6 billion so far in this month. According to the provisional data available on exchanges, FPIs bought shares worth $97.2 million on Thursday. Traders may take note of report that the commerce ministry has made a case for encouraging domestic manufacturing of 102 items like chemicals, electronic products and insulin injection as their share in the country’s total imports are high. Though, there may be come cautiousness as rating agency ICRA said capacity utilisation in India is expected to dip in the first quarter of current fiscal and is expected to gradually rise by the third quarter, and indicated that the economic recovery will be hurt by the Russia Ukraine tensions, however it will see recovery by the end of the year. Meanwhile, to streamline the process of public issue of units of REIT and InvIT, markets regulator Sebi reduced the time taken for the listing of such emerging investment vehicles to six working days from the present 12 days. There will be some buzz in the power stocks with report that India's peak power demand met or the highest supply in a day touched the all-time high of 204.65 GW amid ongoing heatwave sweeping through vast swathes of the country increasing demand for electricity. Fertilizer industry stocks will be in focus with report that India’s fertiliser subsidy bill is likely to shoot up by 55 per cent to record Rs 2.5 lakh crore this fiscal as the government will provide additional funds to make up for the spike in cost from higher import price. There will be some reaction in telecom stocks with telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw’s statement that the government is likely to hold 5G spectrum auction in early June. The minister said that the Department of Telecom is working as per expected timeline and the process is on to resolve industry concerns around spectrum pricing. The Street will react to the some big corporate earnings slated to be announced later in the day.

The US markets ended higher on Thursday after robust earnings from Meta Platforms (Facebook parent) lifted beaten down tech shares. Asian markets are trading mostly in green on Friday tracking overnight gains on Wall Street.

Back home, Indian equity benchmarks ended the Thursday’s trade on an optimistic note with frontline gauges garnering the gains of over one and half percent, amid broad-based buying, tracking a rebound across global markets. After a positive start, markets gained more strength, as sentiments got upbeat with an authoritative seasonal forecast from the South Asian Seasonal Climate Outlook Forum report that normal to above normal rainfall is most likely during the 2022 southwest monsoon season (June-September) over most parts of South Asia. The street was also finding support with private report stated that as the country recovers from the pandemic, the retail industry has resumed its growth trajectory and is likely to witness 10 per cent annual growth to reach approximately $2 trillion by 2032. Domestic sentiments remained upbeat, as the Centre approved the continuation of the Prime Minister Street Vendor's AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme till December 2024. Traders took note of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s statement that in an interconnected world, sanctions can have unintended consequences, and India is trying to work through them. Meanwhile, ahead of the end of five-year assured compensation period on June 30, the Centre acknowledged that an amount of Rs 78,704 crore was yet to be released to the state governments towards fully compensating them for their Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenue shortfall for the financial year 2021-22. Finally, the BSE Sensex rose 701.67 points or 1.23% to 57,521.06 and the CNX Nifty was up by 206.65 points or 1.21% to 17,245.05.   

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