Finance

May 26, 2020 6 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Businesses are trying to cope with the global health crisis, and many are struggling to crack the code to keep their brands relevant and stable as it persists week after week. The thought of staying possible, let alone growing a business, during a time like this can be extremely intimidating. During difficult times, many companies opt to pursue new leads in an effort to increase revenue, rather than remembering that it costs less to nurture the customers they already have. A strong, solid customer base can…

The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data Driven World by Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman, MIT Press, 2020 The current pandemic is a dramatic case study in why experiments matter. How else are we to know which tests accurately identify COVID-19 infections and their telltale antibodies, whether and how well drugs already at our disposal mitigate the suffering inflicted by the coronavirus, or whether the vaccines currently in development will actually protect us from it? Randomized controlled trials are the only way to answer these questions short of playing Russian roulette with the lives of large numbers of…

Reliance Industries Ltd’s Rs 53,124 crore rights issue, which has already been oversubscribed, on Tuesday received further bids for 88 million shares, taking the subscription to nearly 130 per cent, according to stock exchange data. The issue subscription data on stock exchanges showed total bids received at 549 million, overshooting the 422.6 million shares on offer by 29.8 per cent. The BSE received applications for 485 million rights shares, NSE for 56.4 million and the non-ASBA bid quantity stood at 7 million rights shares. As per Dealogic, the rights issue is the…

June 1, 2020 5 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. From the entertainment sector to the health and fitness industry, stay-at-home orders have forced many entrepreneurs to improvise and share their skills virtually. Instagram Live has emerged as an outlet of choice for enterprising business owners. Hop on Instagram right now, and you’ll likely see dozens of users and brands either going live or advertising an upcoming live stream. Though it’s becoming more popular in recent months, live-streaming has largely been underestimated. But it won’t stay that way for long: Instagram’s algorithm rewards live-streaming with additional …

On the insistence of the regulator, and directions issued by the apex body of non-life insurers – General Insurance Council – the insurance companies are working on a standardised insurance product for Covid treatment, with sum assured ranging between Rs 1 lakh and 5 lakh. The product needs to be offered mandatorily from June 15 onwards and the insurers have been given time till June 4 to come up with recommendations on the product, said sources aware of the development. In view of disparity of claims for Covid treatment, recently, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI)…

Moody’s Investors Service (Moody’s) downgraded the Government of India’s foreign-currency and local-currency long-term issuer ratings to Baa3 from Baa2 and maintained a negative outlook. The downgrade came after market hours on Monday. READ ABOUT IT HERE Here’s how leading analysts have interpreted the development and its likely impact on the markets. Abhimanyu Sofat, head of research, IIFL Securities Moody’s decision to lower India’s rating is a reflection of the stress in Indian economy and fiscal situation that has been amplified by the virus outbreak. We believe the subdued policy response for short…

May 28, 2020 7 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. As any digital marketing pro can tell you, programmatic advertising is one of the most critical — and least understood — concepts in the industry today. It’s a strategy made more difficult by the fact that individual platforms and vendors in the space use a confusing array of redundant and overlapping terms to describe the process. For the average business, though, understanding and making use of programmatic advertising is essential in today’s multichannel environment. In reality, programmatic advertising is a pretty simple thing to grasp, once…

Gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have given investors an average return of 48.7 per cent over the past year. Investors who have become overweight on the yellow metal (vis-à-vis their original allocation of 10 or 15 per cent of their portfolio) should book partial profits from time to time and bring their allocation back to the original level. If they allow themselves to become heavily overweight on the yellow metal, it will increase their portfolio risk. Whenever the bull-run in gold ends, their portfolio could take a beating. Most experts today are of the view that the…