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HYDERABAD: The Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (Irda) is set to allow insurance companies to invest in a few more financial instruments, including derivatives. The proposed move will enhance returns for policy holders. Derivatives, such as options and futures, are financial...

Should insurance need be separated from investment? Though opinions vary, buying term policies works out to be the economical option. Since a term plan is a pure-risk insurance product, its premium works out much cheaper than, say, an endowment plan. For instance, an endowment plan of an...

MUMBAI: DSP Merrill Lynch Fund Managers Thursday announced the launch of DSP Merrill Lynch World Gold Fund, an open ended fund of funds scheme investing in gold mining companies through an international fund The primary investment objective is to seek capital appreciation by investing mainly in...

MUMBAI: DSP Merrill Lynch Fund Managers Ltd said on Tuesday it would no longer charge the 2.25 per cent entry load in World Gold Fund for investments of Rs 50 million or more. The load stays for lesser investments. The fund house managed assets worth about Rs 128 billion at the end of June, data...

MUMBAI: ABN AMRO Asset Management (India) Ltd said on Tuesday it has extended the closing date of ABN AMRO Flexible Short Term Plan-Series F to July 30 from the earlier scheduled close of July 24. The fund house managed assets worth about Rs 69 billion at the end of June, data from Association...

MUMBAI: Fearing that potential investors would be driven away because of the requirement of mandatory quoting of PAN, the mutual funds industry has charged it was being discriminated against, especially with relation to other players in the financial sector. While Permanent Account Number is...

MUMBAI: Retail investors looking to cash in on the booming stock market have been increasingly taking to the mutual fund route over the past few years. While this has no doubt fattened the bottomlines of asset management companies, it is mutual fund distributors who are actually laughing all the...

MUMBAI: IT investment and spending is set to rise in the US, according to a forecast by Forrester Research. This may be good news for Indian vendors hurt by the rising rupee and worries of troubles in the sub-prime lending space spilling over into other areas. “With a moderate tech investment...

MUMBAI: Xerox’s Global Services (XGS), a division of the $15.9-billion document management company, is all geared for an expansion overdrive in India. In line with the company’s improved focus on its services business in the country, the company hopes to double its workforce in India for XGS...

NEW DELHI: Faced with rising operational costs and higher-than-the-industry attrition rates, captive centres in India are turning to third-party BPOs/vendors to manage their centres and take over the less strategic work, while retaining control over some of the key functions. Smaller captives...

BANGALORE: The biggest work campus of tech giants Infosys and Wipro will soon be outside Bangalore, their home turf. Pune is set to overtake Bangalore as the largest single unit campus (SUC) for Infosys by 2008-end, while in the case of Wipro, it is Pune, Chennai or Hyderabad that may eclipse...

SHANGHAI: Chinese shares opened higher on Monday because of hopes for strong corporate earnings, despite further monetary tightening announced by the central bank on Friday. The Shanghai Composite Index was up 0.80 per cent at 4,091.242 points, its highest level this month. On Friday, it...

NEW YORK: On Wall Street, where the most lucrative credit markets are barely limping, thanks to the worst housing slump in a decade, there isn’t a chief executive officer who will tell you there is a crisis. A few weeks after Merrill Lynch CEO, Stanley O’Neal said, he saw ‘no clear signs’ that...

MUMBAI: Asian stock markets were mixed Tuesday. Most regional indices traded in positive terrain, but Japanese shares were subdued and South Korean indices came off earlier highs. Stocks in Japan moved lower dragged by machinery firms such as Komatsu and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Shares of...

BANGALORE: Is the IT party over? For the moment, it looks so. With the strong rupee impacting adversely the profits of every IT company, salary increments are expected to take a hit. And more of the salary is likely now to become part of the variable component, so that you get more only if you...

BANGALORE: The rupee's rise is expected to hit BPO employees harder than it hits IT employees. Unlike IT, where 30 per cent to 50 per cent of employees work on-site (at the clients' site) and are paid in dollars, in BPOs, 90 per cent to 95 per cent of the work is done in India and those...

MUMBAI: Investors showed they were willing to play the ‘high risk-high return game’ by pumping in $3.34 billion into emerging market funds during the third week of July. According to data collated by Emerging Market Portfolio Funds Research, Asia funds (ex-Japan) sucked in $1.79 billion, while...

The market is at its all-time high. What’s your reading of the equity market? Like life, the equity stock market will always remain a mystery. The markets always present opportunities albeit with attendant risks at every stage. Currently, the market is driven by corporate earnings, P/E ratios...

Growth through acquisitions and alliances has become a critical part of creating value for pharma and biotech manufacturers and their shareholders. However, companies and their investors may risk value destruction if they acquire rights to a drug that suddenly poses unanticipated safety risks...

Political affinity to the ‘small’ man and the consequent love for the ‘children of God’ by the state is understandable. In statecraft he is quite useful as he has one vote which he generally exercises. But in markets, which believe in survival of the fittest, he is really small in terms of...