Let me answer your query stock wise with a quick view of the results highlights.

Hindustan Unilever reported 11.67% growth in sales at Rs.13,046 crore for the Sep-21 quarter. Revenue growth was visible across home care, beauty, personal care and food and refreshments. The best growth of 15.7% came from the home care segment while foods and refreshments grew at just about 7.2%.

However, food business saw EBIT grew by 18.8%, which also held the profit growth in positive territory. EBITDA grew 9% yoy while EBITDA margins stood very strong at 25%. As a result, despite cost pressures from commodity price hike, the net profits were up 10.49% at Rs.2,181 crore. HUL also declared interim dividend of Rs.15 per share. Let me turn to Nestle.

Nestle India reported 9.62% growth in sales revenues at Rs.3,883 crore. Sales growth comprised of 10.1% growth in domestic sales and just about 1.3% growth in export sales. Nestle saw growth across food, beverage and confectionary categories with a big boost finally coming back to the out-of-home or OOH channel.

Like in HUL, cost of inputs made a dent on operating profits as OPMs tapered from 22.38% in the Sep-20 quarter to 21.96% in the Sep-21 quarter. Calibrated price hikes helped maintain growth. Net profits were up 5.16% for the Sep-21 quarter at Rs.617 crore even as net margins compressed 68 bps. Nestle declared second interim dividend of Rs.110/ share.

Finally, I come to ACC, which saw revenues grow 5.98% to Rs.3,749 crore. ACC witnessed good growth across cement and ready mix concrete verticals. In terms of volumes, ACC reported marginal volume growth to 6.57 MTPA in the Sep-21 quarter. EBITDA margins were flat at 19.5% as a spike in power, raw material and freight costs hit growth.

ACC reported 23.73% growth in net profits at Rs.450 crore. While the PAT margins at 12.01% were better than 10.29% in Sep-20 it ended up lower than 14.66% NPM in Jun-21 quarter. Volumes and growth are positive but cost remains the constraint.

In the side lines of the Global Investment Summit in UK, Gautam Adani has announced massive plans to invest $50-70 billion in the renewable energy value chain. These investments are likely to happen in the next 10 years and Adani has also committed that 70% of all capital outlays in the next 10 years will pertain to renewable energy.

On Tuesday, the Nifty did open and held through the first half. However, the Nifty gave up all its gains and a lot more by the close of the day as the Nifty ended 58 points lower at 18,418. I will come back to the resistance part later, but the two factors that spooked markets were the China GDP slowdown and cost spikes in Indian companies like HUL.

The concerns were depicted in the sharp deterioration in the A/D ratio or the advance decline of the Nifty at 16:34 on Tuesday. The stock that had rallied smartly in the last few weeks, ITC, came under pressure on worries that the GST duties could once again be hiked, as is the normal practice. HUL corrected despite good results on cost spike concerns.

Foreign investors were net sellers of Rs.506 crore of equities while domestic funds sold Rs.2,578 crore. Domestic selling has been harsh and consistent in the last few days. In global market trends, Dow ended 60 bps higher while NASDAQ was 71 bps up. European indices were flat to mixed on China growth concerns. SGX Nifty is 11 bps higher in early trades.

I am not sure if the concerns are about the 18,500 levels and that is jut incidental. There are two major concerns for markets. The first is that cost spikes are putting pressure on the profitability of most Indian companies and HUL was an example. The second concern is on a likely hard landing in China. These are the issues that will drive markets.

It is not just L&T but even L&T Infotech and L&T Technology Services are all trading at multi-year highs. Both LTI and LTTS reported strong quarterly numbers for the Sep-21 quarter and that favourably impacted their stock prices. L&T scaled a record high of Rs.1,854 as it emerged the lowest bidder for the first three buildings of Common Central Secretariat under Central Vista redevelopment project at Rs.3,141 crore. The order book of L&T continues to be very strong.

That is absolutely correct. In a rather surprising move, an analyst at Nomura has downgraded Reliance Industries citing rich valuations. The stock has been in the midst of a dream run and this downgrade is likely to create some doubts in the minds of individual investors. However, institutional investors will still be driven by the momentum in the stock and the aggressive investments being made.

This downgrade is rather surprising considering that the quarterly results are expected on this Friday. Interestingly, this is the first time in many years that the specific analyst at Nomura has downgraded the RIL target. Nomura has no problem with the business model of Reliance, but just feels there is too much front in valuations. The Reliance stock has sharply rallied by more than 30% since the end of July.

This is likely to be a first of its kind alliance between a mutual fund manager and an advisory firm. Axis Asset Management and Inversion Advisory Services (founded by Akhil Gupta) will collaborate to launch a fund that will invest in underperforming companies. They propose to jointly raise Rs.3,500 crore under the AIF registration of Axis AMC. It is proposed that Axis MF which will be the investment manager to the proposed fund.

Inversion Advisory will provide the necessary support to buy companies supported by its team of functional and industry experts in the turnaround domain. The principal aim of the fund is to buy controlling stakes in assets that are either pre-stressed, stressed or distressed. The idea is to use turnaround as the investment theme and invest in underperforming companies that are cheaply assets vis-à-vis their intrinsic value.

Let me clarify that Moody’s has raised the rating outlook and not the rating of Indian banks. The rating outlook has been upgraded by Moody’s for the Indian banks from “Negative” to “Stable”. This outlook upgrade is in the midst of the asset quality stabilizing and improving as well as enhanced capital buffers. In addition, the rating agency has also pointed out that the improving operating environment should support asset quality in the future too.

As a result of these two factors, the effective credit cost for the banks is expected to come down sharply. Moody’s also added that while the quality of retail loans had deteriorated in the last few months, the impact would be marginal. To compensate, the quality of corporate loans had improved. Capital adequacy ratio of the banking system has sharply improved from 9.9% in FY19 to 11.1% in FY21 and that triggered the upgrade.

The latest deal comes less than a week after Reliance Retail Ventures bought a 40% stake in Manish Malhotra couture via a stake in MM Fashions. Now, Reliance has announced a 52% stake buy in the Ritu Kumar line. While Manish Malhotra largely caters to the very up market segment and Bollywood glamour events, Ritu Kumar is upper mid-market.

The value of the transaction has not been made public. As part of the buying, Reliance took over the entire 35% stake of Everstone PE fund. Ritu Kumar conducts its business under 4 broad fashion brand portfolios. Reliance Retail is planning to build a complete Omnichannel platform to cover both proprietary and marquee brands under a single roof.