Investors in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) could see fewer instances of prices drifting significantly away from their underlying value, particularly during sharp market moves. New trading rules that came into effect on September 7 change how ETF price bands are set and bring reference prices closer to actual market levels, with limits tailored to different asset classes.

The changes are particularly significant for gold and silver ETFs, which now have a pre-open auction and greater flexibility for price bands to expand when global bullion prices move sharply overnight.

One key change is how exchanges determine the base price for applying price bands. Under the existing framework, exchanges use the ETF’s Net Asset Value (NAV) from two trading days earlier, or T-2, for this purpose.

Sebi has now replaced this with a more recent reference price, such as the previous day’s closing NAV or other real-time valuation measures, depending on the ETF category. The change removes the one-day lag that can cause ETF prices and the value of their underlying assets to move out of sync.

The market regulator has also moved away from the earlier system of fixed price bands. Until now, most ETFs were subject to a price band of up to 20%, irrespective of the volatility of the underlying asset. Under the revised framework, price bands will be dynamic and will vary depending on the type of asset tracked by the ETF. This is expected to allow ETF prices to respond more efficiently to market movements while avoiding unnecessary trading restrictions.

What changes from today?

1.) The first change is to the base price used to determine the day’s trading range. Instead of relying on an older valuation, the base price will now be the previous day’s closing price, calculated as the volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of the ETF’s trades during the last 30 minutes of the previous session. In effect, the day’s trading range will begin from where the ETF actually traded towards the close of the previous session, rather than from a two-day-old valuation.
2.) The second change is to price bands, which will now vary according to the underlying asset. Equity and debt ETFs will begin the day with a 10% price band, which can widen in steps up to 20%.A 15-minute cooling-off period will apply each time the limit is tested. Gold and silver ETFs, meanwhile, will start with a tighter 6% band. However, given that global bullion prices move around the clock, their bands can expand in 3% steps with no upper cap. This allows the ETF price to adjust towards its fair value even after a large overnight move in global markets. Overnight and liquid ETFs, whose values barely move, will continue to have a fixed 5% band.

3.) The third change applies specifically to gold and silver ETFs, which will now begin each trading day with a pre-open call auction, the same mechanism used for stocks. During this process, buy and sell orders are collected before the market opens and matched at a single equilibrium price. This means the opening price is determined by the balance of demand and supply rather than by the first stray order of the day.

The revised framework is aimed at making ETF price discovery more responsive to the underlying assets, particularly when there are significant overnight moves in global markets.

What does it mean for investors?

For ETF investors, the changes are expected to bring ETF prices closer to the value of their underlying assets, reducing instances of large premiums or discounts to NAV.

They could also improve liquidity and price discovery, especially during volatile market conditions, while making trading in commodity ETFs more efficient.

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

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NEW YORK — Robert Kiyosaki, the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” used a weekend social-media post to spotlight an old Bitcoin purchase even as a Vanity Fair profile and a string of follow-up stories put a $1.2 billion debt figure back in circulation.

TheStreet reported that on Sept. 5 Kiyosaki wrote on Facebook that he once paid $400 for a single bitcoin. He framed the holding as proof that buying early and waiting matters more than chasing a peak. The same report said commenters immediately pressed him about the debt number he has repeated for months. TheStreet also noted that some of the price details in that post did not match market records: Bitcoin’s high near $126,080 on Oct. 6, 2025, left the coin well above $20,000 even after a steep pullback.

The debt figure is not new. Kiyosaki has used it on podcasts and on social media since at least 2025. On the “Get Rich Education” podcast in June he said, “So, I’m a billion two in debt.” He added a warning in the same breath: “Should not do what I do, right? But I studied it since 1974… If you’re going to learn to use debt, you’d better take some education.” He has said Dave Ramsey’s stay-out-of-debt message “is good for most people.”

In an earlier appearance, when asked whether that much leverage made him nervous, he laughed. “Are you shitting me?” he said. “No. I’ll tell you why. If you owe the bank $20 million and you can’t pay it back, you got a problem. But you owe the bank $1 billion and you can’t pay it back, it’s their problem.”

That line is a modern version of an old banking joke. It is also the core of the argument he has sold since “Rich Dad Poor Dad” first appeared in 1997: treat borrowing used to buy income-producing assets as different from borrowing used to fund a lifestyle. On “The Hannah Hammond Show” he put it this way: “Debt is money. My poor dad always says, ‘Get out of debt.’ Dave Ramsey says, ‘Get out of debt.’ My rich dad says, ‘Only lazy people use their own money — your job is to borrow money.’” In a March 2025 post he posed the contrast as a contest. “My friend Dave Ramsey says ‘Live debt free.’ I say ‘I use debt to invest. I am $1.2 billion in debt.’ Again, who is right?”

Kim Kiyosaki, his former wife and still a partner in the businesses, told Vanity Fair the headline number is “widely misunderstood.” She said it is the total debt on a real-estate portfolio owned with partners, not a personal unsecured tab. “We have a lot of apartment houses with our partners,” she said, putting the count at about 1,500 units. “So technically, yes, we have all this debt,” she added, but it is attached to those assets. Vanity Fair, working from Kiyosaki’s own claim that he earns about $3 million a year, estimated his personal slice could be in a range of $30 million to $60 million. “He loves to say things that shock,” Kim Kiyosaki said, so that he can then “explain it in more detail, why investment debt is good.”

Kiyosaki described the legal structure in the same profile. “If it all comes to hell, you can talk to my attorney,” he said. “Firewalls — that’s the way the rich play the game.” The magazine said properties sit in separate limited-liability companies, a common real-estate practice meant to isolate one building’s problems from the rest of a portfolio.

That is leverage on apartments. The weekend Facebook post was about something else: a scarce digital asset he has promoted for years as a hedge against what he calls “fake” dollars. On X he has written, “The rich do not save money. Since 1965 I have saved real silver. Since 1971 I have saved real gold. Since 2012 I have saved Bitcoin. Since 2022 I have saved Ethereum.” He has also said he later stopped buying at certain prices — silver near $60, bitcoin near $6,000, gold near $300 — and that he has sold some bitcoin and gold because he dislikes capital-gains taxes. Those posts sit alongside other messages in which he told followers he keeps buying. The record is not a single, tidy trading log. It is a public sales pitch that has shifted with the market.

He has attached large price targets to the same assets. After what he calls a crash, he has predicted gold at $35,000 an ounce, silver at $200, bitcoin at $750,000 and ether at $95,000. He has separately talked about bitcoin at $250,000 in 2026. Those forecasts have missed earlier deadlines. In 2024 he said bitcoin would hit $350,000 by late August of that year. It did not.

The tension in the current coverage is therefore not whether Kiyosaki likes debt. He has said so for decades. It is whether a $1.2 billion partnership liability and a $400 bitcoin souvenir belong in the same sentence as proof of the same method. One is borrowed money sitting on rental buildings whose tenants, in his telling, service the loans. The other is an unlevered bet he says he made when the coin was cheap. Mixing them makes for a sharp headline. It does not make them the same risk.

“Rich Dad Poor Dad” has sold more than 40 million copies and turned a parable about two father figures into a seminar, radio and product business. Kiyosaki, 79, co-wrote books with Donald Trump, including “Why We Want You to Be Rich.” He still tells audiences that cash savers are “the biggest losers” and that U.S. national debt — now above $40 trillion on Treasury’s published totals — will punish people who hold dollars. He has called the 401(k) “the biggest mistake I think ever made” and said it will “decimate” baby boomers.

Critics answer that his crash timetable has slipped for years, that bitcoin remains volatile — it has fallen tens of thousands of dollars from its 2025 high — and that most households cannot borrow against apartment blocks. Kiyosaki himself has said they should not copy him without education. “If you can’t manage debt — live debt-free,” he said on another podcast. “But the opposite side of that is to learn to handle debt.”

What the latest cycle of stories actually established is narrower. Kiyosaki keeps advertising a $1.2 billion debt total. His longtime business partner says the number belongs to a group that owns about 1,500 apartments, and that his own share is far smaller. He keeps pointing to hard assets and to an early bitcoin purchase he now values as a lesson in timing. Followers used the comment thread on that purchase to ask about the debt. He has not posted a personal balance sheet that would settle the argument. Until he does, the public record is the one he chose: a shocking figure, a partner’s clarification, and a $400 coin he wants remembered as the smart side of the ledger.

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The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has eased regulatory compliance requirements for foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) that invest exclusively in government securities, removing the need for them to furnish investor group details.

The move follows the Reserve Bank of India’s decision in June to withdraw concentration limits for FPIs investing in government securities through the General Route.

Sebi, in a circular issued on Monday, said the requirement to identify the investor group of an FPI investing only in government securities was no longer relevant following the RBI’s decision.

“FPIs investing only in Government Securities shall not be required to furnish investor group details,” SEBI said, modifying the relevant provision of its master circular governing FPIs, designated depository participants and eligible foreign investors.

Sebi had earlier, through a September 10, 2025 circular, provided a similar exemption to FPIs investing exclusively in government securities under the Fully Accessible Route. The latest amendment extends the relief to FPIs investing only in government securities more broadly.

The regulator said the move was aimed at providing greater ease of investment to FPIs.
Depositories, custodians and designated depository participants have been advised to make the necessary changes to their systems to implement the revised requirement.The changes will take effect immediately, Sebi said.

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

Portfolio Review

U.S. stocks advanced sharply. U.S. equities posted double-digit quarterly gains despite volatility stemming from the Iran conflict. Robust earnings, resilient economic data and continued momentum in artificial intelligence (AI)-related stocks supported gains. However, stocks pulled back slightly in

AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla has begun charging passengers for rides in the Cybercab, the two-seat electric car it built without a steering wheel, pedals or side mirrors, even as U.S. safety regulators opened a review of how the company certified that design as legal.

Paid trips started in Austin on Sept. 4, the day after an invitation-only launch at ACL Live. Riders hail the car through Tesla’s existing Robotaxi app, in the same geofenced area already served by driverless Model Y vehicles since June 2025. Users told reporters the Cybercab fare on identical routes was lower than the Model Y option. Tesla executives at the event described dynamic pricing and promised “a first-class experience at coach price.”

Elon Musk did not attend. In a promotional video released the same day, he called the Cybercab “the first car that is specifically built for unsupervised full self-driving.” In the days before the event he pinned a post that read, “A storm of Cybercabs.” Texas motor-vehicle records showed about 45 Cybercabs registered to Tesla’s robotaxi fleet as of late August. The company’s broader Texas robotaxi registration list stood near 420 vehicles, most of them Model Ys — fewer than half the nearly 1,000 vehicles Alphabet’s Waymo has registered in the state.

That gap between slogan and fleet size is the first fact that matters. The Cybercab is no longer a prototype on a studio lot. It is also not a mass service. Tesla held the launch without a public livestream. Presenters included lead engineer Eric Earley, vehicle-software head Silvio Brugada, designer Ian Kettle and autonomy chief Ashok Elluswamy. The talks lasted about 15 minutes. Tesla did not announce a consumer sticker price, a delivery calendar or the next Cybercab city.

The hardware is the second fact. The production car is a two-door liftback with scissor, or butterfly, doors, a large cabin screen and a passenger stop button. Press the button and the vehicle is designed to pull over when it is safe and connect the rider to Robotaxi Support. There is no rear window in the conventional sense and no human controls. Some test units still carried a safety monitor in the front passenger seat. The commercial pitch is that those monitors eventually disappear.

EPA certification filings published in June filled in the third set of numbers. The Cybercab uses a single front-mounted permanent-magnet motor rated at 163 kilowatts, or 219 horsepower, and a lithium-ion pack of about 48 kilowatt-hours. Curb weight is 3,113 pounds (1,412 kilograms), light for an electric car sold in the United States. Unadjusted laboratory combined range was 418.2 miles; applying the standard adjustment yields about 293 miles, in line with Tesla’s earlier “close to 300 miles” language. Energy use in the filing works out to roughly 165 watt-hours per mile. Payload is listed at 617 pounds.

Those specs explain why Tesla wants this body instead of a Model Y with the seats ripped out. A smaller pack, two seats and no driving hardware cut weight and cost if the software can actually drive. They also explain the regulatory fight. On Sept. 4 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit of the process and technical data Tesla used when it self-certified the wheel-free, pedal-free vehicle as meeting federal safety standards. The probe does not by itself pull cars off Austin streets. It does put a federal file on the feature that makes the Cybercab different from every other Tesla in the ride-hail mix.

Production is the fifth fact, and it is real but narrow. Tesla said the first production unit left Gigafactory Texas in February 2026. Formal production followed in April. Musk had said on X, “Cybercab, which has no pedals or steering wheel, starts production in April.” In January he warned that the start would not look like a Model Y ramp: “For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast.” Tesla’s second-quarter update in July dropped the Cybercab from the sentence that had promised volume production in 2026 for Cybercab, the Semi and Megapack 3. The factory line in Texas is described as having capacity above 125,000 vehicles a year. Capacity is not the same as cars in paid service.

Manufacturing method is the sixth. Tesla is using an “unboxed” process that builds large modules in parallel and joins them at the end, aiming to shrink paint-shop work and line length. Earley told the Austin audience, “We’ve unlocked a 50% reduction in line size while increasing the output of the line.” Company materials have cited a smaller factory footprint and lower labor cost versus a conventional line. The long-term cycle-time boast — a finished Cybercab every 10 seconds — remains a target, not a published factory rate.

Price is the seventh. Musk said in 2024 the vehicle would cost under $30,000 and has since answered that consumers should be able to buy one. The September launch did not confirm an MSRP. Tesla began circulating a robotaxi interest form aimed at fleet buyers and infrastructure partners. An interest form is not an order bank. Musk has still said Tesla intends to sell Cybercabs to customers, not only run them in its own fleet. That sale would require the same autonomy software — and the same regulators — that now govern the Austin rides.

Software is the eighth, and it is the constraint Musk himself has named. “This is a very important step, to put the Cybercab in production, but ultimately, it only matters if the software can allow a car to navigate safely,” he has said of the program. He has also told investors, “Really, we should be thought of as an AI robotics company,” and, “If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.” Launch Cybercabs use Tesla’s camera-based system and AI4-class hardware. A later AI5 computer has been discussed for mid-2027. Competitors such as Waymo still use lidar and radar and operate in more U.S. metros.

Geography is the ninth. Austin is the Cybercab city. Tesla’s Model Y robotaxi service has also appeared in Dallas, Houston and Florida markets including Miami, Orlando and Tampa, with permits discussed for Arizona and Nevada. The company said Cybercabs would go on public display in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities from mid-September as design exhibits, not as a sales or robotaxi launch in China. Elluswamy posted, “The streets won’t be the same anymore.” Asked whether Cybercabs would “flood Austin,” Musk replied, “Yes.” Forty-five registered cars is not a flood.

The tenth fact is what the launch did not settle. Tesla did not say when unsupervised Cybercab rides will run without a monitor in every market, when volume production returns to the official forecast, or how NHTSA’s file will end. Morgan Stanley’s Andrew Percoco wrote before the event that a mere unveiling with few cars on the road could pressure the stock, while a rollout that materially enlarged the fleet could support it. Shares jumped ahead of Thursday’s show, then fell after the quiet debut and the regulator’s notice.

What exists today is simpler than the decade of robotaxi promises that preceded it. A purpose-built two-seater is in limited paid service in one Texas city. It has no wheel. It has a stop button. It is cheaper on some routes than Tesla’s own Model Y robotaxi. It is outnumbered by Waymo in Texas and by Tesla’s own Model Ys in the same app. The factory can make more. The software, the certifications and the next city list will decide whether “a storm of Cybercabs” is a product plan or a pinned post.