Mumbai: New demat account additions rose to a seven-month high in August, marking the third consecutive month of growth after a prolonged period of moderation between January 2025 and May 2026, as robust IPO activity drew more investors to the markets.

NSDL and CDSL together added nearly 3.27 million demat accounts in August, the highest monthly addition since January 2026. The total number of demat accounts stood at 237.7 million at the end of the month.

The figure does not represent the number of unique investors, as individuals can hold multiple demat accounts. The number of unique investors is estimated at around 135 million.

“Buoyancy in IPO markets is one of the reasons for the sharp jump in new demat accounts. Strong small- and midcaps have also raised investor return expectations from IPO debuts,” said Sriram Velayudhan, senior VP, IIFL Capital Services.

Read more: Crude oil rally nears $100: Will geopolitical risks push prices higher?

The pickup came amid weakness in the benchmark indices, with the Sensex falling 1.5% and the Nifty declining 1.2% in August. However, segments of the market that tend to see stronger retail participation remained buoyant. The BSE MidCap 150 gained 1.6%, the BSE SmallCap 250 rose 2.4% and the BSE Microcap 250 jumped 6.2% during the month.
Robust primary market activity was a key factor driving new account additions, experts said. August was the busiest month for IPO and offer-for-sale (OFS) activity in 2026, with 23 IPOs raising ₹22,448 crore and two OFS transactions raising ₹31,660 crore.

With Jio and NSE expected to launch their IPOs in the coming months, market participants expect the pace of demat additions to pick up further.

An Amazon Air cargo plane overshot the runway while attempting to land at Miami International Airport, killing five people and seriously injuring five more.

The Boeing 767-300 cargo aircraft crashed just before 14:00 local time (19:00 GMT) after departing from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The flight also hit several vehicles on the ground.

Amazon said that it is “working closely with local authorities and officials to understand exactly what happened”.

All flights were ordered grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as fire crews raced to the smoking crash site. The crash comes over Labor Day weekend, one of the busiest travel times of the year.

“At least five people have lost their lives, and five others are injured,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference on Sunday evening.

She added that rescue crews arrived at the scene within “seconds” of the crash.

“Right now, our focus is on the families, those who were injured, and the ongoing response,” she continued.

Three of the five people injured are in critical condition, said Miami Fire Chief Raied Jadallah. The mayor said they were all taken to hospital with “unknown injuries”.

Several of the injured were trapped inside or under vehicles on the ground, and needed to be extricated by fire and rescue crews, said Jadallah.

Officials say it is too early to know the cause of the crash, and that it will be investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. The federal agency, which investigates all air crashes in the US, plans to hold a news conference on Monday.

The Amazon flight operated by 21 Air, a charter company based in North Carolina, “overran Miami International Airport’s diagonal runway and is disabled at the northwest end of the airport,” the airport said in a statement.

Miami Dade Fire Rescue said crews “arrived to find an airplane that had caught on fire as a result of this crash, with heavy flames and smoke showing”.

The billionaire Stokes family has regained control of the merged Southern Cross Media Group, with Ryan Stokes appointed chair seven months after his father stepped down.

The chief executive of SGH has been selected as non-executive chair, effective immediately, after previously being appointed a board member in the merger.

It comes seven months after his billionaire father, Kerry Stokes, parted ways as chair in February, briefly handing over to Heith Mackay-Cruise before the latter stood down.

Now former chair Teresa Dyson had been holding down the role but will now chair a new risk, regulatory and compliance committee.

More to come…

 

 

Mumbai: India’s primary market is set for yet another busy week, with 16 companies, including 12 mainboard and four SMEs, looking to raise more than ₹7,190 crore as they seek to ride the ongoing IPO wave.

The mainboard IPOs lined up for the week from September 7 to 11 are Pranav Constructions, Glass Wall Systems India, Prasol Chemicals, Kanohar Electricals, Manipal Payment & Identity Solutions, Steamhouse India, LCC Projects, Karamtara Engineering, Rentomojo, Asset Reconstruction Co India, Veegaland Developers and Manika Plastech.

In the SME segment, Apana Logistics, Infrax Renewable, Vinod Texworld and Amtech Esters will launch their IPOs.
Read more: Sebi’s new sectoral debt fund category explained: Yields, tax and risks
IPO fundraising has remained robust so far in September, with 14 mainboard issues raising around ₹7,640 crore. This follows a strong August, when 23 mainboard IPOs raised around ₹22,456 crore. In the SME segment, seven IPOs have raised ₹260 crore so far in September, compared with 23 issues that raised around ₹1,159 crore in August.

Calamos Investments is a diversified global investment firm offering innovative investment strategies including U.S. growth equity, global equity, convertible, multi-asset and alternatives. The firm offers strategies through separately managed portfolios, mutual funds, closed-end funds, private funds, an exchange traded fund and UCITS funds. Clients include major corporations, pension funds, endowments, foundations and individuals, as well as the financial advisors and consultants who serve them. Headquartered in the Chicago metropolitan area, the firm also has offices in London, New York and San Francisco.  For more information, please visit www.calamos.com.

August was a good month in financial markets, with the S&P 500 up around 2.7%. The market leaders came from the commodity complex, with gold and bitcoin (not sure how this should be classified) being the two top performers. High up as well was GSG (GSG), an ETF tracking the broad commodities market, with a roughly 50% weight in the energy complex. Stocks also had a good month, led by emerging markets ex-China (EMXC), which represents a bounceback of the semiconductor-heavy Korean and Taiwanese markets after their massive rally and subsequent correction. Tech did well in the U.S. as well, with NASDAQ up 4%. Finally, the non-AI complex held its own, with low volatility (USMV) and value (VTV) stocks doing well.

The market’s consternation was focused on the long-end of the Treasury curve, as well as on government debt markets globally. A lot of the concern centers around large and growing government debt loads, and though the US experience is not particularly anomalous across either level or rate of change of government debt to GDP (see below), the dollar bore the brunt of investor concerns. The rate-sensitive parts of the stock market, utilities and REITs, were the worst-performing sectors in the month.

QuantStreet’s performance remains strong. We track the returns of several strategies, and you can see those numbers here. More detailed analysis of our performance relative to benchmarks is available via our strategy-level tearsheets. Please reach out at hello@quantstreetcapital. com if you would like to see these.

Interest rates

Since the start of the year, longer-term interest rates have increased around the globe. U.S. 10-year rates (GT10) are about 50 basis points higher than they were at the start of the year. UK (GUKG10) and Japanese (GJGB10) 10-year rates have increased even more. Even Germany, a stalwart of fiscal conservatism, has seen its 10-year rates rise so far this year.

The rate increases have been associated with ominous-sounding news headlines, like this recent one warning that Treasury secretary “Scott Bessent Has a $40 Trillion Problem as Interest Rates Are Closing in on a Multi-Decade High”. The Treasury’s recent intervention in the long-end of the yield has not as of yet achieved the desired results of calming investor fears, with the FT warning that “Scott Bessent’s intervention to prop up the market failed to soothe investor jitters.” Even CNN, not usually known for its front-page economics coverage, has weighed in with “The war is raising the price of money. That’s a problem for the global economy.” Sentiment surrounding interest rates remains tense.

Importantly, the U.S. is hardly the only country with debt and spending issues. The next chart plots the government debt-to-GDP levels across several developed economies. The U.S. is not the worst of the bunch. Our general debt trajectory has mirrored that of other developed countries.

The same is true about our fiscal deficits. The next chart shows that the U.S. budget deficit of roughly 5.8% (as of the end of 2025), while in the bottom rung of peer economies, has followed a very similar pattern to the budget deficits of other countries. Excessive government spending is a global problem and the sell-off seen across government bonds is really a global issue.

Theories

There are many theories out there for what’s been happening with long-term interest rates. One is that the higher level of short- and long-dated interest rates simply reflects market expectations for higher future growth; indeed, the currently elevated stock price-to-earnings ratios suggest that the market expects rapid economic and earnings growth. Much of the AI data center build out is being financed with debt, again in anticipation of high future growth, and this additional supply is leading to increased interest rates to induce investors to invest.

Supporting this view, inflation breakevens–the difference between 10-year nominal and real interest rates–are well-contained. Outside of inflation risk premium considerations, this suggests that market participants believe the Fed is in control of inflation expectations.

The long-end of the yield curve contains two components. One is the market’s expectation about future short-term interest rates. The other is the term premium investors demand to hold Treasuries relative to shorter-dated and less price sensitive securities. According to a recent piece by Apollo’s Torsten Slok, the 10-year Treasury term premium has remained stable over the last 12 months, suggesting that the increase in 10-year rates reflects investor expectations about higher future short-term rates (and growth), and not an additional risk premium due to fiscal concerns. Though another recent piece from Stanford’s Hanno Lustig questions this interpretation, arguing that the term premium has, indeed, increased when looked at over the last several years.

Hanno Lustig also shows that the Treasury convenience yield, which is the difference in yields between highly rated corporate bonds and Treasuries, has largely disappeared over the past few years, suggesting that the specialness of Treasuries is diminishing relative to comparable high-quality non-Treasury bonds. It’s hard to attribute the recent disappearance of the Treasury convenience yield to anything other than investor concerns about lending money long-term to the U.S. government.

Consistent with this theme is a recent FT article about European countries repatriating their gold reserves back to Europe. According to the FT, this is out of a fear that an “unreliable American government under President Donald Trump may otherwise seize them amid growing transatlantic tensions.” If this is where people’s minds are at, it is no surprise that Treasuries are also losing their appeal as an impregnable store of value.

Our own take is that multiple factors are at work. First, higher rates undoubtedly reflect elevated growth expectations. The AI boom is for real, and whether or not all of the current investment proves justified, the investment will get made for the next few years, which will pressure bond yields as a large supply of new bonds comes to market. Second, it is unlikely that inflation concerns are behind the selloff, especially in light of inflation breakevens remaining well anchored. Third, while current fiscal deficits combined with growing government debt loads and increasing interest rates are almost certainly not sustainable in the long-term, a short-term, bond-vigilante driven Treasury selloff also seems unlikely. (The level of credit default swaps which track U.S. government debt is not elevated and the level of U.S. national wealth, however one might measure the latter, is surely much higher than our annual GDP, suggesting that the U.S. debt-to-national wealth ratio is far lower than our roughly 120% debt-to-GDP.)

Keep in mind, these are our current views based on the information available to us, and our analysis of this highly complex topic may well prove incorrect as economic and market conditions evolve.

(As usual, John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution also has an interesting take on things, which you can read about here. Cochrane discusses many potential reasons for the increase in yields, without taking a stand on which reason is the most probable.)

Portfolio positioning

Looking to the month ahead, we continue our attempt to find exposures that are not directly AI-related: as AI adoption increases, our view is that the non-AI parts of the economy stand to benefit, and this is exactly the types of companies that represent the value and low-volatility parts of the market. We maintain slightly conservative positioning by reducing the allowed tail risk limits at each of our portfolio risk levels (the latter determined using portfolio realized volatility). Across all of our portfolios outside of the one targeting 100% stock-level risk, these tightened tail risk limits led to an increase in our short-term Treasury exposure and a decrease in our S&P 500 exposure. We are not turning bearish, but perhaps are turning slightly more cautious as a lot of good news has already been priced in.

On the Treasury front, we admit that 10-year rates in the 4.8% range and 30-year rates in the 5.25% range are beginning to look appealing. Despite that we maintain our model allocation discipline and stick with low duration exposures until our model return forecasts for and the return trends of longer-dated bonds become more attractive. (The caveat is that these are just model forecasts, and future returns on longer-dated bonds may be much more attractive than our models suggest.)

In addition, we exited the commodities position we initiated at the start of last month. Our model still likes a commodities allocation as trend, model forecast, and diversification all point in the same direction. However, as we regularly warn, the model could always be wrong, especially if there is salient information the model does not have access to. And with regard to that, we were struck by a Bloomberg article which quoted Secretary Bessent as saying he believes the Strait of Hormuz may become a “worthless piece of water” in a couple of years as oil shipments bypass the Strait. Add to that evidence that more ships continue to pass through the Strait, and it raises the possibility that the war in Iran will continue, while the global oil market will remain well supplied. We do not want to get stuck in an oil-heavy position in such a scenario, and so we exit the trade.

---

---

Original Post

Editor’s Note: The summary bullets for this article were chosen by Seeking Alpha editors.

Mumbai: Indian private equity and venture capital funds have forewarned the government and financial regulators that changing the definition of ‘foreign control’ for these local funds could significantly hurt capital inflow.

Commonly called alternative investment funds (AIFs), these local fund houses, which have emerged as significant sources of risk capital, made a strong appeal at a meeting about a fortnight ago with senior officials of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and ministry of finance, two persons familiar with the discussions told ET.

At stake is the future of the fast-growing AIF industry which has been pooling in money for over a decade from local and offshore investors to bankroll unlisted firms, startups and expanding businesses.

Their concern and the urgent plea requesting a status quo on regulations, stems from the draft FEMA (Foreign Investment) Rules 2026. The draft, released by RBI on July 21, 2026, gives regulators the scope to change the parameters that qualify an AIF as ‘foreign controlled’. Currently, an AIF with almost all offshore investors is regarded as a domestic entity if its sponsor and investment manager are Indian owned and controlled.
As SEBI and RBI had expressed before, such a rule opens the door to regulatory arbitrage: a foreign investor barred from ownership or control in sensitive industries puts money in an AIF (backed by Indian sponsor and manager) to indirectly acquire equity stake in companies operating in sectors having foreign direct investment (FDI) restrictions.

After the draft July guidelines, AIFs fear that a relook at the ‘foreign ownership and control’ definition to curb such indirect ownership would mean that even AIFs with Indian managers and sponsors would be considered as foreign entities if majority of the fund corpus is contributed by foreign investors. Once categorised as foreign entities, such AIFs would run into investment restrictions and formalities applicable to foreign direct investors.
With non-residents accounting for 40% of AIF investments, the draft rules have rattled the industry, as ET had reported on August 11.”At the meeting, the AIF lobby tried to put across the point that the India story can be best sold by Indian managers. They are best positioned to canvass for capital from various markets — a strategy that has worked in the last 10 years. The industry said that if the government intends to liberalise foreign investments, such a change could slow down inflows,” said a person who attended the meeting.

In fact, AIFs have even asked for a carve out in the existing regulation so that funds whose sponsors and managers are owned and controlled by listed Indian financial institutions should be treated as domestic AIFs even if more than 50% equity of these institutions is with foreign persons. “Private banks and NBFCs are regulated and registered with RBI. As long as they are listed, AIFs backed by them should be considered domestic. AIFs have asked for simplification of rules related to ultimate beneficial ownership,” said a source.

The regulatory and ministry officials neither raised the issue of regulatory arbitrage nor reacted to the points made by AIF industry officials whose views on the draft norms were sought. The concerns over regulatory arbitrage was first captured in a note placed before SEBI board in May 2024. Besides AIFs’ ‘indirect ownership from downstream investment’, it said, “..there is scope that the investments could flow from our land border sharing countries through AIFs in companies beyond the permissible limit for automatic route under FDI policy, undermining the spirit of Press Note 3 notification and the steps taken by Government of India in this regard.”