May bar premature withdrawals from fixed maturity plans.
These choices are going to be made available to Indian fund houses by S&P's index services division through India Index Services. ETF is a passive fund wherein investments are made in index companies as per their individual weightage. In times of uncertainty, betting on indices rather than individual companies helps. Index-based products thus become popular.
Sebi likely to come out with a policy paper soon.
The Securities & Exchange Board of India has decided to conduct a survey to find out why investors are staying away from the securities market. This is the first time that the market regulator is planning such a survey of investors.
India Inc's quarterly profit registered its biggest drop since the stock market regulator made it mandatory for firms to announce quarterly results in March 1998.
In a key change in its stance, the Securities and Exchange Board of India said it is keeping its options open on banning short sales, which a section of brokers believes are responsible for the collapsing stock market. The benchmark Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex fell below 10,000 Friday, the first time since July 2006.
The last two days' recovery in commodity prices has done little to ease all-round fears of a global recession following the sharp dip in prices over the past three months. Nor are things likely to improve soon.
A representative of a large FII having a huge share in the issue of P-notes said that these relaxations are "no big deal". The 40 per cent limit on investments through P-notes was not a hurdle as selling by FIIs in the last three quarters have been so huge that most of them have enough leg room for issuing fresh P-notes.
Forward contracts are settled by CCIL, but there is no guarantee that the parties may comply with CCIL's terms. "We have proposed to RBI to allow us to provide a guarantee for forward deals," said CCIL Chairman R H Patil. With the CCIL guarantee, banks providing products to currency hedgers, will benefit as they will have to make a lesser provision towards capital adequacy.
Commodity futures exchanges are set for another round of equity restructuring with the Forward Markets Commission, the regulator, currently finalising guidelines that will require anchor investors to prune their equity holding to 26 per cent from the present 40 per cent after three years but before five years.
Sebi wants to reduce the time gap between the closure of an issue and its listing. This process is aimed at removing refund-related concerns and the grey market in IPOs.
The decline in stock values has created room for the issue of fresh participatory notes, but there are not many takers. P-notes are off-shore derivative instruments issued to foreign investors having securities as underlying. Sebi had banned the issue of derivative P-notes on October 25 last year. Brokers have started focusing on direct FII money rather than the P-note investments. New P-note regime & FII registration procedures are being implemented based on Sebi circular.
Move follows 26 per cent acquisition in Ahmedabad's NMCE.
C S Bhave has to work on the homework of his predecessor to speed up the processes in the market. He also has to contend with the bitter legal battle between Sebi and his organisation NSDL.
The results of quarter ended December 07 are less impressive than the corresponding quarter last fiscal. However, it is premature to conclude about the overall performance of companies.
Fresh investments through participatory notes (P-notes) are flowing into the cash market in huge quantum. The rush of investments is because foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have enough headroom to invest through P-notes.
The software sector has once again underlined its importance to the country by accounting for more than half of the total jobs created by Indian industry in the last financial year.
Stocks lead the chart with 50 per cent returns, followed by real estate and gold. The markets may be expecting a correction now, but the year has been a spectacular one for those who had put money in stocks. Equities gave a return of 49.64 per cent, the same as in the last three years.
Foreign institutional investors, who are big players in the futures and options segment, are making a killing in the domestic market by using arbitrage as a weapon in the spot and derivatives trade as well as structured derivative deals. The arbitrage game is on despite the curb on the issue of P-notes or participatory notes by the Securities and Exchange Board of India recently.
Till 15 days ago, only two PSUs - Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) - ranked amongst the five most valuable companies. But with two more PSUs, Mineral and Metals Trading Corporation (MMTC) and National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), seeing sustained rise in the last three months, the number has risen to four.