Featured On Yahoo Finance - The next multibillion-dollar opportunity for Amazon

There has been a lot of talk about Amazon’s ad-business lately, and for good reason. For Amazon, which can do with some margin expansion, the digital advertising space represents a big opportunity.

According to estimates, Amazon’s advertising business raked in $1.2 billion in revenue last year. While the number seems rather small compared to Amazon’s way bigger e-commerce and AWS segments, this segment is growing at a fast clip. Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak expects Amazon’s ad-revenue to grow to $7 billion by 2020. However, the opportunity could be even bigger. Exactly how big? Read the whole post on Yahoo Finance.

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The RBI’s ‘operation twist’ – A sign of bigger measures to come, or a tweak to bandage the fiscal deficit?

If you’ve read financial dailies lately, it’s unlikely you’ve missed the term ’operation twist’, describing the RBI’s recent announcement that it will buy long-term Indian government bonds while selling short-term Indian government bonds through special open-market operations. A little trivia While the RBI didn’t officially come up with this name, the move reminded market observers of a similar policy move adopted by the US Fed back in 1961 (and later in 2011, under Fed Chair Ben Bernanke), dubbed ‘operation twist’, apparently inspired by American songwriter Chubby Checker’s popular number, ‘The twist’. In the context, it may be tempting to imagine RBI Chairman Shaktikanta Das grooving to yesteryear-actor Mehmood’s ‘Aoo twist karein’ from the 1960s, but this ‘twist’ isn’t probably quite as entertaining. What this is all about and the story so far On 19 December 2019, the RBI announced that it would conduct special open-market operations, buying long-term government sec...

What is smart beta, and how does it fit into the larger scheme of things?

Keeping pace with terminology in the world of investing can be daunting for most investors, so before we dive right in, let’s spare a few moments to grasp the backdrop and context that have led to the emergence of the term ‘smart beta’, after a quick look at what it is. In a nutshell, smart beta sits at the intersection of active and passive investing. While active investing is an ideology that advocates cherry picking and monitoring investments, passive investing most commonly involves investing in a portfolio of securities that replicates an index, without trying to take advantage of ‘mispricing’. For those unfamiliar with these terms, the following sections should help. The reality of active investing – it’s a mixed bag While both – active and passive – approaches have their merits, they also have drawbacks, and to understand this in a bit more detail, let’s start with active investing, the older and more traditional style of investing, with a focu...

The RBI's Quarterly Monetary Policy Review - 31 July 2012 - SLR Cut ! Cuts Both Ways?

The RBI's announcement on July 31st 2012 following its Quarterly Monetary Policy Review (Q1 - FY 13) saw the SLR requirements for banks cut from 24% to 23% of NDTL (Net Demand and Time Liabilities). While the announcement has on one hand signalled liquidity relief/enhancement for the banking system and the economy thereby, the move has come in for a fair amount of criticism on financial news channels and websites alike. So, has the RBI missed a trick? In the week preceding the 9th of July 2012, the liquidity deficit (banks’ borrowing from the RBI) in the system (LAF) had come down significantly from a high of Rs 90,000 crores to around Rs 10,000 crores owing to a host of reasons. The significant ones being: Banks had drawn about Rs. 25,000 Crores by availing the export credit refinance option after the RBI enhanced the limit of the export credit refinance facility for banks from 15% to 50%, a move that was expected to provide an additional liquidity of about Rs. 30,000 crores (...

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