Could A Cricket Loss Affect Your Stocks Today?: Your Top India Headlines for Thursday

Day traders, be on guard. With the all-important Australia-India world cup semi final today, there is a risk that an India loss could trigger selling, according to this study of links between critical cricket matches and stock market movements. Apparently, while a win has no impact, a loss leads to impulse selling in the stock market. One consolation could be that a loss in a match outside India has a somewhat lower impact than a loss in India.
Statistically, although India has not lost a single match in this World Cup, it has won just one out of the last 14 encounters against Australia on the Sydney Cricket Ground. Small wonder that cricket watchers call this THE World cup Final. Indian stocks have also been on a high, after an investor-friendly budget and two interest-rate cuts, so we’re headed for a nail-biting day both for cricket and stocks.

Twitter’s acquisition of Zipdial and CEO Dick Costolo’s India visit have paid off. The microblogging site has tied up with the Modi government to launch Twitter Samvad (Twitter Discussion) through which the prime minister’s tweets can reach people through SMS. Zipdial uses India’s unique “missed call” behavior to help companies send information to interested customers. It is, however, likely that the main objective of this initiative is to reach out to the non-English speaking Indians, more than 90 percent of India’s 1.1 billion strong population. Two problems in digitally reaching out to this segment – low data usage and language constraints – appear to have been solved with Twitter Samvad.

Flipkart looks at job creation: The e-commerce aims to create 2 million jobs in India in 2015, with 60 percent of this coming from logistics and warehousing. According to the company’s statistics, 75,000 jobs were created in the last one year and has 30,000 sellers on its platform. To put the numbers into perspective, the manufacturing and export industry added 158,000 jobs in the July-September quarter, according to a rather dated government report released on Wednesday. Given these numbers and even taking into account Flipkart’s growth rate, 2 million does look like an ambitious target.

Warnings from rating agencies follow endorsements from development banks: After the IMF and ADB projected a faster growth rate for India versus China, the rating agencies are coming up with warnings for the Modi government. Clearly impatient with its inability to push through banking reforms, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings have warned that without those, it will be hard for the government to meet any of its growth targets. Specifically, practices such as micro-managing banks and forcing lending may deter loans from going to growth sectors which will need finding, rather than politically-driven social loans.

Here’s what Ratan Tata has been up to: In the two years since he retired as the chairman of India’s oldest business group, Ratan Tata has been quietly investing in the startup world. He has invested some of his estimated $1 billion of personal money in eight companies in the last one year. Interestingly, most of the investment have been in e-commerce and related businesses, suggesting that Tata has also bought into the ‘Great Indian E-commerce Story.’

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