Cycling Financial News

Vehicle loan pools are expected to maintain stable performance in the medium term because of the strong domestic cycle and efforts of financiers to ramp up collections, rating agency Icra said on Thursday, adding that the impact of fluctuations in global fuel prices will be a key monitorable.

Investing.com — Apple has been linked with Baidu over using the Chinese internet giant’s AI models in China, while Nissan (OTC:NSANY) launches a new three-year business plan. Goldman turns more positive on European equities, while Wall Street looks set to start the new week on a negative note.

It will be a strange week, given the calendar’s lunar eclipse on Monday and the market’s closure on Friday. Add to that a PCE report on Friday, the day the market is closed, and a Jay Powell interview on the same day.

Bitcoin price rose on Monday, recovering a measure of losses from last week as sustained capital flows into exchange-traded funds and anticipation of the upcoming “halving” buoyed the world’s largest cryptocurrency. In addition, BlackRock (NYSE:BLK)'s venture into asset tokenization and the initiation of a global central bank easing cycle also contributed to bullish pressure.

As the festival of Holi draws near, the atmosphere is full of anticipation, joy, and excitement. The colourful environment around us brings back fond memories of picking a favourite colour and smearing it on our loved ones; or of happy colourful ‘barely’ recognizable faces digging into some festive sweets or smiling up to a camera.

Amitabh Kant, the former CEO of NITI Aayog, expressed sorrow over her untimely passing through an online post, recalling her vibrant spirit and academic pursuits. «Cheistha Kochar worked with me on the LIFE programme in NITI Aayog. She was in the Nudge unit and had gone to do her Ph.D in behavioural science at LSE. Passed away in a terrible traffic incident while cycling in London. She was bright, brilliant & brave and always full of life. Gone away too early. RIP,» Amitabh Kant said in a post on social media platform X. Cheistha's life came to an abrupt end as she was struck by a garbage truck while cycling, with her husband Prashant, a software engineer, only a short distance ahead. Prashant, upon hearing the collision, hurried back to find Cheistha critically injured. Despite the swift arrival of police and paramedics, Cheistha succumbed to her injuries at the scene. The involved lorry, suspected to be a waste collection vehicle, remained at the site, with the driver cooperating with the ongoing police investigation, reports said. As of now, no arrests have been made, and inquiries continue.

Edited excerpts: I would interpret this as each regulator doing what they are doing in terms of good housekeeping and making sure that rules are followed. Making sure that disclosures are adequate, and processes are in place. I don't know if there is a master plan which is suddenly combining everything together, but I would say each of the regulators in their domain is doing things.

BENGALURU : Amid a downturn in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, marked by declining sales and delayed purchases, innovation-led differentiation has emerged as a key challenge for most SaaS firms, globally, including in India, a top executive at Lightspeed said in an interview. Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, focussing on SaaS, enterprise infrastructure, crypto, and space and satellite investments, said with rising competition, the sector has become crowded with “hundreds, if not thousands, of companies going after the same set of customers". Around 80% of the SaaS market is now saturated, with every category witnessing several alternatives over the past two decades of the internet, he added.

NPCI Bharat Billpay (NBBL), banks and fintech firms are in talks to implement banking interoperability, following central bank approval for the project, said two senior bankers with knowledge of the matter. NBBL could start work on the pipelines to enable such transactions in April, they said. “Currently, conversations are happening with the large participants in the net banking ecosystem to find the right implementation strategy,” one of the bankers said. “The top banks like HDFC Bank, SBI, ICICI Bank are the largest players in this space.”

credit card spends in the liberalised remittance scheme (LRS) by April 1 — a plan that has been kept in abeyance for a year. Under the belief that reissuing the specific notification may not go against the model code of conduct, many banks are preparing to integrate their systems with RBI’s for capturing the card spend information of individual customers during personal foreign tours. NBBL is a subsidiary of National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI). As part of its 2025 vision document, the RBI wants all payment rails under a centralised payment system. Internet banking is the only one outside the umbrella and the regulator wants this within the fold quickly, putting it on a par with processes such as the Immediate Payment Service (run by NPCI) as well as the Real Time Gross Settlement and National Electronic Fund Transfer systems (run by the RBI).

warmest winter on record, with the unusual warmth concentrated around the Atlantic Basin, which has produced an enormous surplus of gas and slump in prices since October. Surface temperatures on land were +2.65°C above the 20th century average between December and February, according to data compiled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Record warmth in the winter of 2023/24 beat previous highs of +2.44°C in 2019/2020 and +2.61°C in 2015/16 — also winters characterised by surplus inventories and slump in gas prices.

Investing.com — Here are the biggest analyst moves in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) for this week.

Gautam Duggad, Head Of Research — Institutional Equities, Motilal Oswal Financial Services, says: “The consumer discretionary sector holds a significant position in our model portfolio, with eight consumer stocks, predominantly of a discretionary nature. The second sector of interest is hotels, which has ample room for growth after emerging from a decade-long downtrend. Similarly, the real estate sector, which witnessed a prolonged downturn from 2008-09 until recently, is now showing signs of a more enduring uptrend. ” What is the outlook when it comes to the IT space? Does that cautious stance continues due to uncertainties? If so, would the strategy be to look at a mix of large and midcaps or would you stick to just the largecaps? Gautam Duggad: As far as IT is concerned, we are running an underweight stance in our model portfolio. While the stocks have underperformed, especially the largecaps because if you look at the prices of some of the largecaps today, they are still trailing the prices that they had in October 21. Now, with Accenture's guidance yesterday and commentary, the softness can continue to prevail and we might see a little more earnings downgrade.

Pikamoon’s ($PIKA) strategic launch on leading tier 1 exchanges, aligned with the next crypto bull run and widespread positive sentiment, uniquely positions the project for significant success.

cut the interest rates later this year, thus kicking off the rate cut cycle in the market. However, RBI in its Feb 2024 monetary policy meeting (MPC) kept the interest rates unchanged for the sixth time in a row. But this is expected to change as the banking regulator is likely to go for the interest rate cut later this year, Reuters reported.

BSE) has declared to introduce a beta version of the T+0 settlement. The BSE said in a notice on Friday that it will introduce the beta version of the T+0 settlement on 28th March 2024 i.e. on Thursday next week.

Bitcoin's price action is currently under the influence of US spot Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and the highly-anticipated rewards-halving event.

Indian stock market to witness volatile FPI inflow amid US Fed rate cut; earnings growth key driver, say analysts Whereas, US is also witnessing a cool-off in foreign flows. However, US smallcap flows continues to show strong momentum since Jan 2024. “After record inflow of $56bn in the US last week, we saw flows cooling off with outflow of $22.6bn.

Mumbai: Promotions handed out like candy may be a thing of the past, as companies that rushed to retain and motivate talent at a time of hiring frenzy take a closer look at the practice as attrition falls. Consultants and companies said that fintechs, BFSI firms and startups which had frequently used promotions as a retention tool are finding that it has hurt internal parity and raised employee costs. In the last fiscal year, promotions were used to retain middle and senior level executives with institutional knowledge and client relationships, consulting and audit firm Deloitte said in a report.

For the first time in a long time, financial advisors are thinking small.

The cryptoverse has undergone a tumultuous journey in recent years, marked by significant peaks and troughs. However, astute investors recognize that each cycle presents fresh opportunities to leverage the burgeoning growth of nascent digital currencies.