The coronavirus outbreak has resulted in a huge crash in the stock market in India and the world. As the number of cases and casualties are rapidly increasing, there seems no stoppage in tanking the stock prices. In the last 30 days, the Indian benchmark Indexes ‘Sensex’ and ‘nifty’ fell over 30%. This is one of the fastest crashes ever seen in the stock market history.

Moreover, the month of March 2020 also witnessed two lower circuits where the exchanges were forced to stop trading for 45 minutes as the market fell over 10% within a day trading session.

Anyways, as the indexes and stock prices are down significantly since the outbreak, there may be some silver lining for the investors to pick good stocks at a huge bargain. Here is a quick study of the Nifty 50 constituent stocks and how they performed in the month of Feb-March 2020.

Nifty 50 Stocks – Feb March 2020 Performance

As you can notice from the above table, none of the constituents of Nifty 50 has given positive returns from 01 Feb 2020 till 24th March 2020. All of these stocks have given negative returns. However, the magnitude of the hammering in their prices varies from stocks to stocks.

1. Out of the 50 stocks in NSE Nifty, only two companies were able to limit losses within -10%. These were Hindustan Unilever (-7.71%) and Dr Reddy’s laboratory (-8.4%).
2. Next, 17 out of 50 companies’ share price has fallen between 10-30% in this time period. This list includes companies like Kotak Mahindra Bank (-29.7%), Eicher Motors (28.84%), ITC (-27.26%), Infosys (-21.81%), Asian Paints (-17.76%), NESTLE (-16.32%), etc.
3. For 24 companies in Nifty 50, the share price has fallen between 30-50%. This might be a good opportunity to look into these companies from an investing point of view. A few major stocks in this range are Bajaj Finserv (-49.37%), ICICI Bank (-42.09%), Bajaj Finance (-42.4%), ONGC (-39.39%), Maruti Suzuki (-35.18%), HDFC Bank (-35.04%), Reliance Industries (-31.72%) etc.
4. For the remaining 7 stocks, the coronavirus has turned out to be a disaster. Their share prices have fallen more than 50% from Feb 1 2020 till 24 March 2020. ‘IndusInd bank’ is the biggest loser in this list with the share price falling more than 75% in this time period.
5. Other beaten-down stocks with a decline more than 50% are Tata Motors (-57.92%), Axis Bank (-57.01%), Vedanta (-55.38%), Zee Entertainement (-53.39%), Mahindra & Mahindra (-51.67%) and Hindalco (-51.05%).

Also read: Indian Markets: A Week Against Coronavirus & Crude Oil Fall

As India and the world are still fighting the war against coronavirus, the market is expected to decline further until this pandemic is contained. However, for the bargain hunters, this might be a great opportunity to pick the biggest companies in India at an amazingly discounted price.

Take care & till next time…!

Kritesh Abhishek

Kritesh (Tweet here) is the Founder & CEO of Trade Brains & FinGrad. He is an NSE Certified Equity Fundamental Analyst with +7 Years of Experience in Share Market Investing. Kritesh frequently writes about Share Market Investing and IPOs and publishes his personal insights on the market.