India stock futures end marginally up; TCS, Infosys gain

MUMBAI, Nov 17 (Reuters) - India stock futures ended marginally higher on Tuesday as selling for most of the trading session was offset by buying in the last hour of trade particularly in bluechip IT counters.

"Today was a tricky situation. Earlier the Nifty was quite sluggish, but some Nifty stocks performed in the last one hour and the buying we saw in the last hour was encouraging," said Manish Kumar, analyst at Pinc Research.

"From a technical point of view there is upside left in the (Nifty) market as nobody is expecting a downturn in the global markets," Kumar said.

The Nifty November contract NIFc1 ended 0.02 percent higher at 5,063.4 points, a premium of 1.15 points to the 50-share NSE spot index .NSEI which closed 0.08 up at 5,062.25 points.

On Monday, the stock futures had ended at a premium of 4.4 points to the spot.

The market was supported by IT major Tata Consultancy Services TCSnsc1 and private sector lender HDFC Bank HDBKnsc1 which rose nearly 3 percent and 1.3 percent respectively on short covering.

Other IT majors such as Infosys Technologies INFYnsc1 and Wipro WIPRnsc1 also rose about 2 percent and 1 percent respectively.

Energy giant Reliance Industries RELInsc1 shed 1.3 percent after investors created short positions as the firm did not make any major announcement at its annual general meeting.

Energy explorer Oil & Natural Gas Corp ONGCnsc1 also ended more than 2 percent down on selling.

"The first hurdle would be to cross 5,150 which we will probably cross tomorrow or day after tommorow, then a new phase of bull run may start," Pinc's Kumar said.

(Reporting by Aniruddha Basu; Editing by Sunil Nair)