At the half way mark, it's ‘Even Stevens’ for the bulls and the bears in terms of series wins.

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Since we are in the middle of the FIFA 2018 World Cup, the scoreline at the half way mark reads three to the bulls and three to the bears.

Bulls lose steam as we hit the halfway mark for 2018. Nifty ends June series down 1.5%. @Nigel__DSouza with more https://t.co/ZKoyoTcehR

— CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18Live) June 28, 2018

The June series was obstructed by various headwinds like US President Trump's tariff flip-flops, Brent crude prices holding above $75 per barrel mark and foreign institutional investors selling nearly $1.3 billion in June 2018 series, causing the rupee to visit the 69 mark for the first time ever.

The headline index has corrected just 1%, but the real pain was seen in the broader markets with midcap and smallcap index losing four percent to nine percent.

The mood in the broader markets was spoilt by the additional surveillance measures that were imposed by the exchanges.

When the market was jittery, we saw realty, metal and public sector banking stocks corrected between five percent to eight percent.

For the bulls, it was the pharma index that was the star performance, with the index delivering returns of approximately 12% with Sun Pharmaceutical Industries leading the way with returns of 20%, while other stocks gave you returns of 10% to 20%.

Bottom fishing was seen in the some of these pharma stocks, which did see some money flowing in to them.

Quality has been in high demand and some of those stocks have seen buying, even though their valuations appear at the upper end of historic multiples.

Case in point is Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which traded at 21x, while Bajaj Finance traded at 5x on a price to book basis, buying quality seems to be the name of the game.

But this list of stocks flirting with their 52 lows from the Nifty pack is quite large as stated below, but the pain point has been heavyweight Larsen & Toubro, which has lost more than 10% of its market captialisation in June series.

The real pain, however, was seen in the broader markets as some of the stocks like HCC that had already halved in 2018, corrected another 27% in the June series.

First Published:Jun 28, 2018 4:02 PM IST