The Indian market extended Wednesday's gains in the opening with the Sensex and the Nifty scaling record highs. The Sensex crossed the 37,000 mark for the first time on Thursday touching 37014.65, while the Nifty crossed its earlier high of 11,171.55 achieved on January 29, 2018.

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This is the 20th time the Sensex has hit record high this year. The BSE index is up 8 percent year-to-date, while it was up 21 percent in the same period last year.

#MarketAtRecordHigh | It’s been a rocky journey for #Sensex to 37,000 after hitting 36,000 in January this year pic.twitter.com/ha8uZ2yxSz

— CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18Live) July 26, 2018

The benchmark indexes have been helped by sustained buying in midcaps led by bank and capital goods stocks. Among index gainers, shares of SBI, ITC, Bharti Airtel, L&T, Tata Motors surged. While SBI topped the Sensex pack, UltraTech Cement led on the Nifty.

Among index losers were stocks of Vedanta, Adani Ports, Tata Steel, Sun Pharma, ONGC, Tech Mahindra, Bharti Infratel, oil marketing companies.

The fall in IT and OMC stocks is driven by the Indian rupee opening stronger at 68.71 against the US dollar on Thursday. The rupee had closed at 68.78 a dollar on Wednesday.

Among sectoral indices on the BSE, capital goods, realty, industrials, finance, bankex, FMCG, energy, basic materials traded positive, rising by up to 0.8 percent. On the NSE, PSU bank, realty, FMCG gained by up to 1.46 percent.

Asian markets traded under pressure with Japan's Nikkei down by 0.10 percent, while Hang Seng has lost over 130 points. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.2 percent. Australian shares fell 0.4 percent.

On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.68 percent to 25,414.1, the S&P 500 gained 0.91 percent to 2,846.07 and the Nasdaq Composite added 1.17 percent to 7,932.24.