SYDNEY — Australian shares closed out a turbulent trading week Friday with the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index shedding just under 1% since Monday, as investors navigated a volatile stretch driven by escalating tensions in the Middle East, rising Australian bond yields and growing expectations of a Reserve Bank interest rate hike later this month.

The week began on a difficult note, with the index sliding sharply Monday and Tuesday amid a global bond market selloff triggered by renewed U.S. military strikes on Iran, which sent oil prices climbing and rattled equity markets worldwide. That pressure continued into Wednesday, extending the ASX 200’s losing streak to three consecutive sessions before the market found its footing later in the week.

Thursday brought the week’s most significant rebound, with the ASX 200 gaining 42 points, or 0.5%, to close at 9,020, as bargain-hunting investors stepped back into the market following its slide to a four-week low. That decline had been driven in part by June-quarter GDP data that came in hotter than expected, reinforcing market expectations that the Reserve Bank of Australia may move to raise interest rates at its meeting later this month. Adding to the concerning economic backdrop, the same GDP figures showed the Australian economy had delivered zero net productivity growth since 2019.

Interest rate markets moved sharply during the week to reflect that shifting outlook, with traders pricing in nearly an 80% probability of an RBA rate increase later in September, a significant jump in hawkish sentiment compared with expectations just days earlier.

Moomoo Australia chief market strategist Tapas Strickland described the somewhat counterintuitive dynamic at play, in which even sluggish economic growth could still prompt the central bank toward tightening rather than easing.

“Some thought the economy is growing a little bit too fast, and so therefore you may actually need to raise rates to slow down the rate of growth, even though the rate of growth is so slow,” Strickland told AAP.

Thursday’s rebound was underpinned by broad-based sector strength. Non-energy minerals led the day’s gains, followed by financials, manufacturing and communications stocks, though losses in energy minerals, consumer durables and healthcare limited the overall advance. Gold miners rallied strongly, with Northern Star Resources and Evolution Mining both climbing 2.6%, while Australia’s big four banks rose between 1% and 2%. Rare earths producer Lynas climbed 2.4% during the same session.

The week’s most dramatic single-stock move came from Corporate Travel Management, which plunged 84% to a near 14-year low after resuming trading following a yearlong suspension tied to missed financial reporting deadlines stemming from an accounting scandal involving its UK operations.

Friday’s session brought the week to a close on a mixed note, with the ASX 200 finishing down 0.16%, snapping the momentum built during Thursday’s rebound. Rising stocks still outnumbered declining ones on the broader market by 660 to 419, with 431 stocks finishing unchanged, even as the benchmark index itself edged lower.

Among Friday’s standout performers, Regis Healthcare led the day’s gainers, rising 5.12% to close at $4.52, a notable bounce following the aged care operator’s sharp declines earlier in the week tied to ongoing uncertainty over government aged care funding policy. Drone detection company DroneShield added 5.11% to finish at $1.75, while uranium producer Paladin Energy climbed 5.06% to $11.83.

On the losing side of Friday’s ledger, Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings fell 8.25% to close at 92 cents, marking the steepest decline among ASX 200 constituents for the session. Fuel retailer Ampol dropped 5.45% to finish at $40.90, while Viva Energy Group slipped 3.49% to $2.91.

Looking across the full trading week through Friday’s close, HMC Capital emerged as one of the standout performers, gaining 8.39%, followed closely by automotive parts retailer Bapcor, which rose 8.02%, and gold producer Ora Banda Mining, up 5.65%. On the other end of the spectrum, Nine Entertainment and Ampol again featured among the week’s weakest performers, alongside continued volatility in Corporate Travel Management following its dramatic relisting collapse.

Mining stocks broadly improved over the course of the week despite dipping on Friday specifically, with copper prices holding onto recent gains and gold continuing to lift on the back of a dovish pivot from the U.S. Federal Reserve, along with sustained central bank gold buying globally. That commodity strength provided a partial offset to the broader pressure facing the market from rising local bond yields and mounting expectations of RBA tightening.

The week’s volatility also unfolded against a backdrop of significant global developments, including Nvidia’s confirmed $12.93 billion acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face, a deal that helped fuel gains across global technology and AI-linked stocks, along with a strong earnings report from cloud company Snowflake that further bolstered sentiment in that sector internationally. Those developments provided some support to global risk appetite even as the Iran conflict and its implications for oil prices continued to weigh on broader market sentiment throughout the week.

Real estate stocks emerged as one of the week’s more consistently pressured sectors, weighed down by the sustained rise in global and domestic bond yields, which makes property trusts’ income streams comparatively less attractive relative to risk-free government bonds. That dynamic weighed on names including Stockland and Charter Hall at various points during the week, even as the broader materials and financial sectors showed greater resilience.

With the Reserve Bank of Australia’s September policy meeting now looming as the next major catalyst for the local market, investors are likely to remain focused in the coming week on further domestic economic data, along with ongoing developments in the Middle East conflict and their implications for global oil prices and inflation expectations. The combination of a potential RBA rate increase, continued geopolitical uncertainty, and lingering volatility in individual stocks following this week’s dramatic moves in names like Corporate Travel Management and Regis Healthcare suggests Australian equities may continue to experience elevated volatility heading into the back half of September.

For years, Nikhil Kamath was often mistaken for his brother Nithin Kamath. But that changed dramatically over the past three to four years, as Nikhil’s profile grew with the success of WTF, the venture capital initiative associated with Nikhil Kamath.

Nikhil Kamath co-founded WTFund, which focuses on supporting young founders and startups.

In a birthday post for his younger brother on X, Nithin said he is now called Nikhil “exponentially more” than before. It is no longer limited to people addressing him by the right name in person. Nithin said he now receives emails, LinkedIn messages and tweets addressed to Nikhil every day.

For Nithin, though, Nikhil has always been the person people turned to. “Right from when he was maybe 15 or 16, he was always the guy to go to for anything,” Nithin wrote, adding that his brother somehow always had connections, with the quality of those connections improving over time.

He recalled one example from their younger years. If Nithin wanted to go out drinking, he would ask Nikhil where to go. Nikhil would point him towards certain places and tell him there would be no entry fee, as long as Nithin told the bouncer his name.

That memory, shared with a laughing emoji, was followed by a very different realisation for the elder brother: Nikhil has turned 40.
“Damn, I can’t believe he’s 40,” Nithin wrote, adding that his brother turning 40 made him feel much older.

Kamath’s first appearance 15 years ago

Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath recently recalled the discount broker’s first appearance in the press 15 years ago, saying the article helped lift account openings from a few hundred a month to nearly 500 and made him believe he had found an early growth hack.

In a post on X, Kamath said the company first appeared in the press on September 5, 15 years ago. The story came at a time when Zerodha was still in its early sales-led phase, and Kamath was speaking to clients under the pseudonym “Sachin”.

“I first spoke to Nikhil as Sachin, my pseudonym for speaking to clients during sales calls. You didn’t want the CEO making sales calls,” Kamath wrote, adding that he had even met customers pretending to be Sachin in Zerodha’s early days.

Kamath said he once picked up a call as Sachin, only to realise that the caller was a journalist from The Economic Times. “I was shocked. I had to suddenly switch from Sachin to Nithin,” he said, adding that he faked a different accent so that he would not be recognised.

The article, according to Kamath, had an immediate impact. “When this story came out, our account openings suddenly went from a few hundred accounts a month to almost 500. I was convinced I had discovered a growth hack,” he said.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

NEW YORK — Tennis star Ben Shelton and Olympic soccer gold medalist Trinity Rodman have become one of the most prominent couples in American sports, regularly traveling across the country and around the world to support one another’s respective careers, even as their demanding schedules frequently keep them apart.

Rodman recently detailed how the relationship began during an appearance on Kylie Kelce’s “Not Gonna Lie” podcast, recounting an unlikely first exchange that started over Instagram.

“I said, ‘You’re sick … fire emoji,’” Rodman recalled. “Shelton responded and was like, ‘Yeah, you were sick at the Olympics too.’ Yeah. That happened. He matched the cringe situation. And then I think maybe a week or two later we met in person.”

Rodman, an Olympic gold medalist in soccer, and Shelton, the top-ranked American man on the ATP Tour, first announced their relationship publicly in March 2025, fittingly through Instagram. The two have remained closely connected ever since, frequently appearing at each other’s competitions across their respective sports.

Rodman has built her own decorated career in professional soccer. She was the youngest player ever drafted in National Women’s Soccer League history at the time, at age 18, and led the Washington Spirit to their first NWSL championship as a rookie in 2021. She also helped Team USA capture Olympic gold at the 2024 Paris Games.

Shelton, meanwhile, enters this year’s US Open ranked No. 9 in the world and seeded No. 8 in the tournament. He holds seven career ATP titles and a 144-90 career record, and while he has yet to reach a Grand Slam final, he has made multiple major semifinal appearances as he continues building toward his first title at that level.

Despite frequently competing in different cities, or even different continents, at any given point in the year, Shelton and Rodman have found ways to remain closely connected and supportive of each other’s respective careers.

“It’s definitely hard … it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, we don’t get to see each other at all,’” Rodman told USA Today Sports. “We are so good at understanding each other’s schedules and the way we operate and times when we need advice, times when we don’t. So going through that together has been amazing.”

Rodman said maintaining individual identity alongside their relationship has also played a key role in their ability to support one another effectively.

“I think we’re always so good at supporting each other,” Rodman said. “And yeah, just being individuals as well, I think has been huge for us of not getting so blended together.”

Rodman attended Shelton’s opening two matches at this year’s US Open, including his four-set, first-round win over Tallon Griekspoor on Monday and his second-round victory against Hubert Hurkacz on Wednesday, where she wore a shirt reading “I heart my boyfriend” while cheering him on from the stands.

Beyond her US Open appearances, Rodman also made a notable surprise trip to support Shelton at the 2026 Canadian Open, where he went on to win the title for the second consecutive year. Rodman flew to Montreal ahead of Shelton’s fourth-round match immediately after the Washington Spirit’s own match, a 4-3 loss to the North Carolina Courage in Washington, D.C. She described the experience of supporting her boyfriend in person as “the best feeling in the world.”

Reflecting further on that dynamic during her appearance on Kelce’s podcast, Rodman described the particular satisfaction of supporting Shelton while also understanding firsthand the physical demands he faces as a professional athlete.

“I think to know we’re both on the grind, running our bodies to the ground, always exhausted, doing what we love, and then to also be able to be a little WAG in a sense, it feels so good for us,” Rodman said. “We do enjoy it a lot because I don’t … look at him and I’m like, ‘He’s an athlete.’ I look at him like that’s my rock. And every time I do something, I just love to be able to look at him and know that we’re on the same page thinking something.”

The support has proven mutual throughout the relationship. When Rodman attended Shelton’s title-winning run at the Stuttgart Open in June, having flown in from Brazil, Shelton publicly credited her presence for his success on the podium following the win.

“I want to thank my girlfriend for flying here from Brazil,” Shelton said at the time. “I won a title at I think every tournament she’s been at this year. … I really appreciate you making the effort.”

Shelton has similarly shown up to support Rodman’s soccer career. He attended the Washington Spirit’s 2-1 win over the Houston Dash on July 3, a match in which Rodman scored two goals, including a game-winning goal in stoppage time. Following that decisive goal, Rodman ran to the stands to share a celebratory kiss with Shelton, a moment that drew significant attention on social media at the time.

The Tennis Channel has previously labeled Shelton and Rodman the most athletic couple in the country, though Rodman expressed some hesitation in fully embracing that title, instead pointing to another prominent pairing in professional sports: the Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson and the Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo. Rodman also joked that she would be wary of ever competing in the same sport as Shelton, given his competitive nature.

“I would be scared to play the same sport, because I feel like if Ben were to say anything coachable, I would lose my mind,” Rodman said.

As Shelton continues his run at this year’s US Open, with Rodman expected to remain a visible presence in the stands supporting his progress through the tournament, the couple’s relationship continues to serve as a rare example of two elite athletes in different sports finding ways to sustain both their careers and their partnership amid demanding, often overlapping competitive schedules throughout the year.

Instagram users began flagging access problems Friday, with outage-tracking services logging a rise in user-submitted reports, though the overall volume of complaints remained within a range trackers consider typical rather than indicative of a major platform-wide outage.

According to Entireweb Status, which monitors the platform’s availability, Instagram received 181 user reports over the preceding 24 hours as of Friday, with 10 of those reports arriving within the most recent hour. The tracking service described the platform as “operating normally” overall, noting no ongoing major outages or confirmed service disruptions at the time of its assessment. Separately, StatusGator reported 38 user-submitted outage reports over the same 24-hour window, similarly characterizing Instagram as currently operational.

Instagram, owned by Meta Platforms, is a widely used social media application that allows users to share photos and videos through its mobile app and website, featuring tools including Reels, Stories, direct messaging, live streaming, shopping features and a range of business tools aimed at creators, brands and e-commerce sellers.

Even relatively modest spikes in user reports tend to draw significant public attention given Instagram’s massive global user base, which numbers in the billions of monthly active users worldwide. Outage-tracking platforms like Downdetector and its competitors compile crowdsourced reports from affected users and compare that volume against typical background activity levels to help determine whether a genuine, widespread service disruption is underway, as opposed to isolated issues affecting individual users’ devices or local internet connections.

Instagram has a well-documented history of periodic outages, some brief and localized, others significant and widespread. According to outage-tracking service NordVPN, one notable disruption in March 2026 affected the platform globally, preventing users from posting new content, refreshing their feeds, or using direct messaging, while other Meta-owned apps including Facebook and WhatsApp continued operating normally during that incident, pointing to a service-specific rather than company-wide root cause.

A separate major disruption in October 2025 was traced to an outage affecting Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing infrastructure provider that Instagram relies on for portions of its backend operations. That outage, which lasted approximately three hours, prevented users from loading their feeds, sharing new posts, or refreshing the app entirely, illustrating how Instagram’s reliability can be affected by disruptions originating well outside Meta’s own direct infrastructure.

Other notable incidents recorded by outage trackers include a March 2025 disruption specifically affecting the ability to post or view comments, and a more significant five-hour outage later that same month that generated more than 19,000 outage reports from users in the United States alone, according to NordVPN’s tracking data.

Instagram’s outage history also includes disruptions specific to its desktop website rather than its mobile application. One incident in November 2025, tracked live by Tom’s Guide, saw more than 2,600 users report problems accessing the platform, with testing at the time indicating the issue was largely confined to Instagram’s desktop version rather than affecting the mobile app, which continued functioning normally for most users throughout the disruption. That particular outage resolved relatively quickly, with reports tapering off within roughly an hour of first being detected.

The scale of user reaction to Instagram outages, even relatively brief ones, often plays out prominently on other social media platforms, with users frequently turning to X to check whether an outage they are experiencing is affecting others as well, or is instead isolated to their own device or connection. That pattern was evident during the November 2025 desktop outage, when social media commentary about the disruption spread quickly even as the underlying technical issue proved to be relatively short-lived and limited in scope.

Instagram’s parent company, Meta Platforms, has historically provided limited real-time technical detail during active outages, typically acknowledging disruptions through brief statements on its own social media accounts before providing more substantive explanations, if any, once an incident has been fully resolved. That pattern has held across multiple significant outages over the years, including incidents dating back more than a decade, when the company’s official Instagram account confirmed and later removed acknowledgments of earlier disruptions as service was restored.

For users experiencing access problems with Instagram, common troubleshooting steps recommended by technology support resources typically include verifying an active and stable internet connection, restarting the Instagram application, checking for and installing any pending app updates through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, and clearing the app’s cache if persistent loading or crashing issues continue. Users are also generally advised to check independent, real-time outage-tracking services before assuming a widespread platform issue is responsible for problems they may be experiencing, since many reported issues ultimately trace back to individual device, network or account-specific causes rather than a broader service outage.

As of Friday, neither Instagram nor Meta Platforms had issued a public statement specifically addressing the reports logged over the preceding 24 hours, consistent with the company’s typical approach of only formally acknowledging outages once report volumes climb well beyond routine background levels. Given that current tracking data shows report volumes remaining within a range multiple monitoring services characterize as normal operating conditions, it remains unclear whether Friday’s uptick in complaints represents the early stages of a more significant emerging disruption or simply reflects the kind of routine, low-level user reports the platform typically receives on any given day.

Users concerned about ongoing access issues are advised to continue monitoring independent outage trackers, including Downdetector, Entireweb Status and StatusGator, for updates on Instagram’s service status, as these platforms typically provide the most current, crowdsourced picture of the app’s real-time availability across different regions and device types.