Weekly Market Update — 9th Aug 2026

Indian Markets

Nifty 50 closed at 24,570, up 0.77% from last week.

The rally was led by tech stocks. The rally in IT stocks was led by smart money reallocating in terms of AI bets they had placed. A lot of AI bets were placed with a hardware centric view which saw a great rally for the Korean markets. Now that the bet has been cracking down, that money is moving from Korean markets and trying to find other pockets. This reason, accompanied with Indian IT companies posting better than expected results, fuelled this move and pushed the sector higher.

The weakest performing sector was Private Banking. RBI came out with an aggressive regulation on private lending. In simple language, they made it more difficult for the banks to lend out loans to individuals i.e. personal loans, credit cards and consumer durable loans. The RBI asked the banks to set aside higher capital reserves before lending out these loans, which makes it harder for the banks to lend money and puts pressure on their earnings by compressing their NIM (Net Interest Margins). This coupled with FIIs pulling out money from emerging markets to de-risk and wait out global interest rate risks led to the underperformance.

Broader Markets

Broader markets outperformed Nifty 50 with Nifty PSU Bank as the leading gainer, mainly due to money shifting from private banks to public sector banks as public sector banks are more resilient towards the RBI regulation.

Gold

Gold was up 5.89% over the last week. Two things triggered which are expected to lead to the Fed cutting rates.

1. Energy prices fell due to the de-escalation of war. After this, the world expects certain deflation, i.e. lower energy prices = lower prices for majority of goods. This means when inflation is already reducing, there is no need for the Fed to increase rates.
2. Bad job loss data — the US had weak job loss data which means to promote growth in jobs, the US government will have to boost the economy by cutting interest rates and infuse liquidity into the markets. This again leads to the Fed cutting rates instead of increasing them.

Now when the Fed is expected to cut rates, that simply means that you will get a lower interest rate to park your money in US Treasury bonds and this leads to a weakening of the Dollar. When investors are getting lower interest on US bonds, they find gold more attractive than US bonds, hence they move money towards gold. Along with this, when the Dollar weakens, as gold is denominated in dollars, gold becomes cheaper for many foreign investors and hence attracts more interest.

Crude Oil

The US paused the planned missile strikes, and this de-escalation stayed its course throughout the week, leading to a 7.7% fall in crude oil. Markets are expecting the locked-up oil to soon hit the markets.