KUWAIT CITY — Kuwait International Airport remains open and operational today, with flights continuing to run through Terminals 4 and 5, though Terminal 1 stays closed following structural damage sustained earlier this year, leaving the airport still short of its full pre-conflict capacity.

According to the airport’s current operating status, passengers flying with Kuwait Airways should expect to depart from Terminal 4, while those traveling with Jazeera Airways will use Terminal 5. Anyone whose original itinerary was booked through Terminal 1 is advised to check directly with their airline regarding rebooking, alternate terminal arrangements or refund options, since that facility remains offline with no confirmed reopening date.

How the Disruption Began

Kuwait International Airport’s ongoing terminal restrictions trace back to damage sustained during the broader regional conflict that has affected Gulf aviation throughout 2026. Terminal 1 sustained structural damage that has kept it closed for repairs for an extended period, forcing the airport to consolidate operations through its remaining functional terminals while reconstruction work continues.

At various points during the height of regional tensions, Kuwait’s national carriers were forced to temporarily reroute operations entirely through Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, requiring passengers to complete lengthy bus transfers to reach their actual flights. While most operations have since returned to Kuwait International Airport itself, the underlying volatility of the situation means schedules can still shift with limited notice, and passengers are being urged to treat travel plans through Kuwait with continued flexibility.

A Long-Term Expansion Continues Alongside the Repairs

Separate from the immediate Terminal 1 repair effort, Kuwait has continued advancing a major, long-planned expansion of its aviation infrastructure. A new Terminal 2, designed by architecture firm Foster + Partners, remains under construction and is targeted for completion in the final quarter of 2026. The project, built around a triangular design, is expected to add dozens of additional gates, thousands of new parking spaces and an air-side hotel once finished, significantly expanding the airport’s overall passenger handling capacity to more than 25 million travelers annually.

That expansion has faced its own setbacks over the years, initially tied to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic and, more recently, to an Iranian drone strike that caused minor damage to the Terminal 2 construction site itself without affecting the project’s planned completion timeline, according to reporting on the situation.

Regional Airspace Advisories Remain in Effect

Kuwait’s airspace continues to fall under an active conflict-zone advisory issued by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which covers Kuwait alongside the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and parts of the Gulf of Oman airspace through at least Aug. 31, unless reviewed earlier. That advisory functions as a safety notice for airline operators rather than a formal closure of Kuwaiti airspace, but it reflects the continued elevated risk assessment surrounding air travel across the broader Gulf region even as day-to-day flight operations at Kuwait International Airport have largely stabilized.

Some regional carriers have used this week to resume previously suspended routes into Kuwait. Qatar Airways is resuming flights to Bahrain, Kuwait and Erbil beginning Aug. 8, as regional aviation continues its broader recovery, while Jazeera Airways has restarted its own flights to and from Kuwait, advising passengers to arrive three hours before departure given ongoing security screening requirements. Separately, Oman Air has continued experiencing technical issues and temporary airspace restrictions affecting parts of its network, with possible delays and cancellations still occurring on some routes tied to Kuwait.

What Travelers Should Expect

Cancellations tied to the broader disruption have continued appearing on Kuwait International Airport’s flight boards this week, though at a far more limited scale than during the height of the conflict earlier this year. Passengers are strongly advised to confirm their specific flight details directly with their airline given how frequently conditions have shifted throughout 2026, rather than relying solely on previously booked schedules.

A Cautious but Functional Airport

For now, the practical answer for travelers is straightforward: Kuwait International Airport is open today, and flights are operating through Terminals 4 and 5 without disruption tied to the earlier conflict. But the airport has not yet returned to its full pre-conflict capacity, and the continued uncertainty surrounding Terminal 1’s reopening, combined with the possibility of renewed regional tension affecting operations on short notice, means travelers should treat any planned trip through Kuwait with the same degree of caution and flexibility that has characterized air travel across much of the Gulf region throughout 2026.

With Terminal 2 construction continuing to target a fourth-quarter 2026 completion and Terminal 1’s repair timeline still unconfirmed, Kuwait International Airport’s capacity is expected to remain constrained relative to its pre-conflict baseline for at least the next several months. Travelers booking flights through Kuwait in the near term should continue monitoring official airline and airport channels closely, given both the ongoing terminal restrictions and the broader regional airspace advisories that remain in effect across the Gulf.

Njord Partners is a London-headquartered investment manager which manages over $1 billion in capital.

Founded in 2013 by former KKR director Jakob Kjellberg and ex-Oaktree Capital executive Arvid Trolle, the firm specialises in providing long-term, flexible capital to companies in financial distress.

Mads Videbæk joined the founders in 2014, followed a year later by turnaround specialist Stewart Higginson, who established the firm’s in-house value creation function.

Njord covers the hospitality and maritime sectors, amongst others, with portfolio companies such as Valiant Pub Company, Ambassador Cruise Line, Red Funnel and Geoquip Marine.

Despite its substantial client base and industry recognition, Njord has maintained a relatively low public profile compared with larger special situations investors. However, the public record shows that it has hired APCO, the PR firm which focuses on reputation management.

As one of the world’s largest PR firms, APCO’s client list has included multinational corporations, governments and politically sensitive organisations and its work has periodically attracted scrutiny.

Most recently, The Guardian wrote that the company had been hired by Labour Together to investigate the origins of reporting into the think tank’s undeclared donations. According to documents seen by the Guardian, what followed was an investigation by APCO into journalists and their sources. The Guardian alleged that APCO compiled personal information and, the outlet claims, erroneously linked several journalists to a hack of the Electoral Commission.

Separately, the Financial Times later highlighted allegations that a senior APCO executive discussed deleting material relating to News UK, whose journalists APCO had investigated, after the company had received legal preservation notices. APCO denied the accusations.

Firms like APCO are rarely engaged without a clear reputation management objective. Irrespective of what prompted Njord’s appointment of APCO, it suggests the company sees value in managing how it is perceived by the media, policymakers and other stakeholders.

In the past, there have been media reports linking Njord Partners to Russian state-owned enterprises through its ownership of RETN, the major international network services provider, founded in Russia. While there is no public indication of the specific reasons for APCO’s appointment, the engagement reflects an awareness of the importance of managing stakeholder perceptions.

Chatbot and AI agent are not the same thing. Plenty of vendors would prefer you didn’t know that.

The confusion is understandable, because both get sold under the same banner of AI-powered customer service, and both arrive in your inbox wrapped in near identical case studies. But the products underneath do fundamentally different jobs, and with adoption accelerating the cost of muddling them up is growing. The ONS found that 29 per cent of UK businesses were using at least one form of AI by June 2026, rising to 49 per cent among firms with 250 or more employees. Customer service is one of the most common places that money lands. So it is worth being precise about what it buys.

Most businesses have already met a chatbot, usually in the corner of their own website. It is a scripted system that matches keywords in a customer’s message against a decision tree someone built by hand, then serves whatever response sits on that branch. Ask where your parcel is and it points you at a tracking page. Ask two things at once, or anything the tree never anticipated, and it stalls, loops, or quietly dumps you into a queue with an apology. For a narrow band of repetitive questions this still works fine, and it is cheap to run once built. Chatbots were designed for deflection, keeping enquiries away from human staff, and they were priced per seat or per message volume accordingly, with no reference to whether anyone’s problem actually got solved.

What a chatbot cannot do is act. It can recite the returns policy all day. It cannot process the return.

That is the line the current generation of AI agents crosses. Rather than matching keywords to a script, an agent works out what the customer is actually asking, poses a clarifying question if the request is ambiguous, and then carries out the task across the systems the business already runs on, whether that is order management, billing or the CRM. Amending a delivery address. Cancelling a subscription. Applying a refund and confirming it, all inside one conversation, on chat, email or increasingly voice. The industry calls this agentic AI, and the plainer way to put it is that the old technology answers while the new one resolves.

Follow the pricing and the difference gets even clearer. Because chatbots deflect rather than resolve, their cost has historically had nothing to do with outcomes, and a business could pay for a year of licences, watch the containment numbers look respectable, and still find most customers reaching a human anyway after a frustrating detour. Agentic platforms are increasingly priced per successful resolution instead. That is not a cosmetic difference. It ties the invoice to the result, which makes the technology far easier to weigh against the salaries and overheads it is supposed to offset. The analysts expect this model to win. Gartner predicts that by 2029 agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80 per cent of common customer service issues, cutting operational costs by around 30 per cent for organisations that deploy it well.

None of which means every proposal marked agentic deserves the label.

A few questions separate the two technologies quickly in a sales conversation. Does the system take actions in other software, or does it only produce answers? Ask to watch it complete a task, not describe one. How does it connect to your existing stack, and can it work with the systems you already have rather than demanding a migration? What happens when it fails? A genuine agent escalates to a human with the full conversation attached, so the customer never repeats themselves. And what oversight do you get, in terms of quality assurance, policy controls and a record of how the system reached its decisions? A vendor who cannot show you any of that is selling a chatbot, whatever the invoice says.

The stakes here are not abstract. The UKCSI, the Institute of Customer Service’s national barometer, reached 78.3 out of 100 in July 2026, its strongest reading in four years, driven largely by more customers saying their issue was handled right first time. That recovery took UK service teams two years of work and it is fragile. A badly scripted bot that traps people in loops chips away at exactly the trust being rebuilt, and British consumers hold grudges about that sort of thing. An agent that fixes the issue outright, or hands over gracefully when it cannot, protects it.

So when the next pitch lands promising AI-powered customer service, skip the question of whether it uses artificial intelligence. Nearly everything does now. Ask whether it responds or whether it resolves. That single distinction decides what your money buys, how the pricing works, and whether your customers end the conversation with their problem fixed or with a link to a help article they could have found themselves.

Quant Small Cap Fund has added SBI Funds Management, Caliber Mining and 11 other stocks in the month of July, according to the monthly portfolio disclosed by Quant Mutual Fund.

The small cap fund added 22,792 shares of SBI Funds Management and 44,988 shares of Caliber Mining and Logistics in its portfolio in July. Among the other 11 stocks, the fund added the maximum number of shares of Hexaware Technologies. It added around 65.93 lakh shares of this stock in its portfolio.

Also Read | Quant MF ups IT exposure as sector enters ‘neglected territory’; sees crude correction

This was followed by the addition of 46.26 lakh shares of Bandhan Bank, 41.18 lakh shares of Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals, and 18.93 lakh shares of Redington to the portfolio during the period.

Bharat Heavy Electricals, Delhivery, Gabriel India, Jubilant Foodworks, KPIT Technologies, Sonata Software and Sumitomo Chemical India were the other new entrants in the portfolio in July.

The fund made complete exit from four stocks in the said time period. Around 1.49 crore shares of IDFC First Bank, 33.10 lakh shares of Anthem Biosciences, 23.23 lakh shares of HDFC Life Insurance and nearly 1.83 lakh shares of EID Parry (India) were sold out from the portfolio.
The fund also reduced its exposure to seven stocks. Around 78.03 lakh shares of RBL Bank were sold, taking its holding to 4.21 crore shares in July from 4.99 crore shares in the previous month.Around 11 lakh shares of SMS Pharmaceuticals, 7.80 lakh shares of National Building Construction and 6.44 lakh shares of Rishabh Instruments were also reduced from the portfolio. The fund sold 5.23 lakh shares of Sula Vineyards, taking its holding to 27.86 lakh shares.

It also sold nearly 3.21 lakh shares of Man Infraconstruction and 2.99 lakh shares of Apollo Tyres in July.

The fund increased its exposure to 10 stocks in July. It added 87.90 lakh shares of Manappuram Finance, taking its holding to 2.56 crore shares during the period. It also added around 38.55 lakh shares of Welspun Living, 35.49 lakh shares of Sona BLW Precision Forgings and 13.27 lakh shares of Capri Global Capital to the portfolio.

The other stocks where the fund increased its exposure were Adani Enterprises, Aegis Logistics, Alivus Life Sciences, Blackbuck, and Ethos.

The exposure remained unchanged in nearly 76 stocks such as Adani Green Energy, Adani Power, Bharti Airtel, ICICI Bank, Juniper Hotels, Piramal Finance and Welspun Enterprises.

As a percentage of NAV, the fund had the highest allocation in HFCL of around 5.44%, followed by 5.33% in NSE Nifty 25/8/2026 and 4.72% in Adani Enterprises.

In July, the fund had 106 stocks in its portfolio against 97 stocks in the previous month. As of July 31, 2026 the fund had an AUM of Rs 34,069 crore. The performance is benchmarked against Nifty Smallcap250 TRI and is managed by Sandeep Tandon, Ankit Pande, Varun Pattani, Ayusha Kumbhat, Yug Tibrewal, Sameer Kate, Sanjeev Sharma.

Also Read | Parag Parikh Flexi Cap current underperformance not noteworthy; cash at 14-15%, HDFC Bank outlook unchanged: Rajeev Thakkar

The top 10 holdings in the portfolio concentrate 38.50% of the total portfolio and top 20 holdings concentrate 59.65% of the portfolio.

Since inception, the direct plan has delivered a CAGR of 17.65%, while the regular plan has delivered a CAGR of 11.88% (as of July 31, 2026). The fund has 20.62% of its portfolio invested in large caps, 8.81% in mid caps and 65.06% in small caps.

According to the fund house’s monthly release, the scheme is suited to investors with a long-term investment horizon and a high risk appetite. The bulk of the portfolio is invested in high-growth companies with attractive valuations that remain relatively under-owned.

“During the month, we raised equity exposure. Exposure to index futures (+5.33%) and autos (+1.42%) was raised, while healthcare (-1.52%) was reduced,” the fund house said.

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

If you have any mutual fund queries, message on ET Mutual Funds on Facebook/Twitter. We will get it answered by our panel of experts. Do share your questions on ETMFqueries@timesinternet.in alongwith your age, risk profile, and twitter handle

Twenty dollars feels like a strange thing to spend on a two thousand dollar car. That’s the logic most buyers use when they skip the history report on a cheap vehicle, and on the surface it sounds reasonable enough.

It’s the wrong instinct though. I’ve watched a buyer walk away from a “great deal” sedan after a report showed a flood title buried under a clean sounding description. Cheap cars aren’t lower risk just because they’re lower priced. Often it’s the opposite, since nobody’s asking hard questions about a car that already looks like a bargain.

A Low Price Usually Has a Reason Behind It

Sometimes the reason is harmless. An owner needs cash quickly, or the mileage is higher than most shoppers want, and the price reflects that honestly. Plenty of solid deals exist for exactly those reasons, and there’s nothing wrong with buying one.

But sometimes the discount is covering for something the listing conveniently leaves out. A branded title. Flood damage that never shows up in photos. An accident repaired just well enough to pass a glance but not a real inspection. None of it requires the seller to volunteer anything unless you ask directly, and a report is often the fastest way to know what to ask about in the first place.

The Math Rarely Favors Skipping It

A basic report costs less than filling up a gas tank. Now weigh that against finding out after the sale that the transmission has flood damage, or that the title was branded salvage two states ago.

A Cheap Carfax Report runs about the price of lunch, which makes the math almost embarrassing once you actually sit down and do it. You’re not saving real money by skipping it, you’re just gambling with slightly better odds than a coin flip.

A cheap car, one bad repair, and suddenly you’re looking at a bill close to what you paid for it. Once it hits you that way, spending a little now to skip a bigger cost later is a no brainer.

Mileage Patterns Tell You Something, Even on Older Cars

There’s an assumption that mileage checks matter mostly for newer, pricier vehicles. And it is really true. A cheap car bouncing between owners every year or so, or showing mileage entries that don’t line up cleanly, is usually hiding a reason it kept getting resold so fast.

Four owners in three years is worth noticing. The report won’t always spell out why that happened, but the pattern itself is a signal, and it’s one most buyers never think to check on a car this inexpensive.

Cheap Cars Get Less Scrutiny, Not More

Buyers tend to comb over an expensive car carefully, checking panel gaps, paint consistency, asking about every scratch. Cheaper cars usually skip that whole check. People just figure the low price already covers whatever’s wrong with it.

But that’s not always true. Maybe the car got hit, nothing major, got fixed up fine, not showroom perfect, but fine. And it’s cheap because the seller just wants it gone. A report tells you if that accident really happened. Now you’ve got something to actually ask about, not just a gut feeling.

There’s also a timing trick worth knowing. Pull the report before you’ve driven an hour to see the car, not after. Nothing worse than finding out a title’s branded salvage while you’re standing in someone’s driveway with cash already burning a hole in your pocket, feeling awkward about walking away from a trip you just made. A few minutes before you leave the house saves you the whole afternoon, and saves the seller an awkward conversation too.

Even a Clean Report Earns Its Cost

Not every report turns up a problem, and a clean one is genuinely useful too. It’s a decent sign the price is fair rather than suspicious, and it takes some of the guesswork out of the decision.

This is where a Cheap Carfax Report pays for itself even when it comes back boring. Boring is good. Boring means the seller wasn’t lying about the one thing that actually mattered.

This matters most when you’re choosing between two similar cars at a similar price. A clean report on one and a vague, patchy history on the other makes that choice a lot easier, without needing a mechanic on standby to break the tie.

It Gives You Something to Negotiate With

A single accident with clean repairs might not be a dealbreaker on its own, but it’s still worth bringing up at the negotiating table, even on a car that’s already inexpensive.

Sellers of lower priced cars often expect less pushback than sellers moving something pricier. A buyer who shows up with a printed report and a specific question or two tends to get taken more seriously, and usually walks away with a slightly better price for the trouble.

Some sellers get weird about it, worth mentioning. Ask for the VIN so you can pull a report yourself, and every so often you get a seller who suddenly stalls, changes the subject, or just stops responding entirely. That reaction alone is information. Most honest sellers don’t care either way, since they already know what’s in their own car’s history. The ones who dodge the question are usually dodging it for a reason.

Cheap Doesn’t Mean Low Stakes

A two thousand dollar car might still be someone’s only way to get to work every day. If that car turns out to have a hidden issue, the financial hit can land just as hard as it would on a pricier vehicle, sometimes harder, since there’s less room in the budget to absorb a surprise.

Applying the same basic diligence to a cheap car that you’d apply to an expensive one isn’t overcautious. It just matches the level of checking to how much the car will actually be depended on, regardless of the number on the price tag.

Skipping the report to save twenty dollars rarely holds up once you think through what a single missed problem could cost later. For a purchase this size, a quick check before handing over cash is one of the cheapest forms of protection you’ll find anywhere in the car buying process.

Reformation, fashion’s latest initial public offering, is full of buzzwords: Sustainability, data-driven design and fast manufacturing are just a few appearing in its filing. But they might not be enough to protect its viral dresses from going stale.

The clothing brand, which became famous for making sustainable dresses that aren’t frumpy, made its public-market debut last week. Its shares are up 7.5% from its offer price, giving the company a market cap of about $1 billion, nearly two times last year’s revenue. That multiple is somewhere between Gap, which fetches a market cap that is about half of its trailing 12-month revenue, and Aritzia ATZ 1.26%increase; up pointing triangle, which trades at four times.

While SpaceX and SK Hynix have dominated headlines as the year’s marquee initial public offerings, both raising tens of billions of dollars and reshaping expectations for what a mega-IPO can look like, a handful of smaller, less-publicized debuts have quietly delivered strong returns of their own in 2026, offering investors alternative ways to gain exposure to some of the year’s biggest market themes without paying the premium valuations attached to the headline names.

The Backdrop: A Banner Year for New Listings

The broader IPO market has performed unusually well in 2026, with the Renaissance IPO Index, a benchmark tracking newly public companies, up roughly 28% for the year, according to Renaissance Capital director of research Nick Einhorn, compared with roughly 11% for the broader U.S. stock market over the same period. Einhorn has pointed to the SpaceX offering as a catalyst for the broader wave of new listings that followed, saying, “This is coming on the heels of the SpaceX IPO. It’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing another large deal, since that was getting a lot of interest and trading well.” That renewed enthusiasm has created an unusually favorable environment for smaller companies to test public markets, even those with far less name recognition than SpaceX or SK Hynix.

Lime: A Scooter Company’s Unlikely Comeback

Perhaps the most striking example of a smaller company thriving amid this year’s IPO wave is Lime, the Uber-backed electric scooter and bike rental company formally known as Neutron Holdings. Lime’s path to going public was anything but smooth. The company’s private valuation collapsed from $2.4 billion in 2019 to roughly $510 million in 2020 as the pandemic emptied city streets and scooter demand cratered, a decline that at the time looked like it might mark the end of Lime as a viable standalone business.

Instead, Lime rebuilt steadily in the years that followed, growing revenue from $522 million in 2023 to $686.6 million in 2024 and $886.7 million in 2025, a 29% year-over-year increase, while achieving free cash flow positivity for multiple consecutive years, a rare feat in the historically cash-burning micromobility sector. Lime priced its IPO at $25 per share on June 30, raising $167 million and valuing the company at approximately $1.66 billion, before shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker LIME and jumped roughly 9% within the first hour of trading, opening at $27 a share.

Uber, which owns more than 10% of Lime’s shares and helped the company absorb Uber’s own former e-bike unit, Jump, acted as an anchor investor in the offering, agreeing to purchase up to $20 million of stock at the IPO price. Lime CEO Wayne Ting has previously described the company’s operational turnaround in strong terms, crediting the business with record profits and expanded global reach even as competitors in the space struggled or folded entirely, saying at one point that the company grew profits faster than revenue while serving more than 24 million riders worldwide.

CoreWeave: An Undersubscribed IPO That Became an AI Darling

Another example of a smaller offering outperforming despite a rocky start is CoreWeave, the AI cloud computing company that went public in March 2025. According to the Motley Fool, CoreWeave’s IPO arrived at an inopportune moment, as concerns about tariffs, weakening consumer sentiment and a potential slowdown in AI spending weighed on investor appetite at the time. The offering was undersubscribed and ultimately priced below its target range, requiring Nvidia, one of CoreWeave’s major customers, to buy into the offering to help it get done.

Since then, as broader confidence in the AI infrastructure buildout has strengthened, CoreWeave’s stock has climbed sharply, supported by revenue growth of 112% in the company’s most recent quarter, reflecting surging demand for the AI computing power it provides to customers. The company remains deeply unprofitable on a standard accounting basis and carries substantial debt tied to its capital-intensive business model of purchasing GPUs to rent out as computing capacity, risks that have kept some analysts cautious even as the stock’s performance has impressed investors willing to accept that volatility.

Why Smaller IPOs Can Sometimes Outperform the Headliners

Market analysts have noted that the largest, most heavily anticipated IPOs of any given year do not always deliver the strongest returns for investors who buy in after the debut. SK Hynix’s own U.S. listing illustrates this dynamic directly: after pricing at $149 per share and briefly touching an intraday high of $177, the stock’s early momentum faded quickly, with shares falling below their IPO price on the very first day of trading, a much faster reversal than SpaceX experienced following its own record-breaking debut. Interactive Brokers strategist Steve Sosnick has cautioned that continued volatility in high-profile IPOs like SK Hynix could carry broader implications for market sentiment beyond the individual stocks involved, saying any sustained tumble could send ripples through the market larger than a typical sector rotation.

That pattern, in which the most hyped offerings sometimes struggle to sustain their initial pricing while smaller, less closely watched companies quietly deliver steadier gains, has become a recurring theme across this year’s unusually active IPO market.

A Reminder About IPO Investing Broadly

Despite these individual success stories, market researchers caution that IPO investing generally remains a difficult way to consistently beat the broader market. Roughly two-thirds of IPOs underperform the broader market within three years of going public, according to data compiled by Simply Wall St, with about 64% lagging the market by more than 10%. At the same time, the same research shows that when IPOs do outperform, the gains can be substantial, with the best-performing 10% of new listings delivering average market-adjusted returns exceeding 300% over a three-year period, underscoring why investors continue chasing new listings despite the poor odds facing any individual offering.

With additional high-profile IPOs still anticipated before the end of the year, including continued speculation around a potential OpenAI listing, investors are likely to keep weighing the tradeoffs between chasing headline-grabbing mega-offerings like SpaceX and SK Hynix versus smaller, less-hyped companies like Lime and CoreWeave that have managed to deliver strong returns of their own, often with considerably less initial fanfare and, in some cases, a far lower entry valuation for investors buying in after the public debut.

This article was written by

Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

Asia’s oldest exchange, BSE, traded far fewer derivatives contracts in the first week following the implementation of the Closing Auction Session (CAS). However, the contracts generated significantly higher premiums, helping the exchange sharply improve its premium turnover and gain market share, according to Nuvama Institutional Equities.

Nuvama said the first week of CAS implementation appears to have curbed last-minute swings, fuelling flows into deep out-of-the-money options. This resulted in a sharp decline in the average number of contracts traded, even as premiums rebounded.

BSE’s average daily contracts traded fell 30.6% week-on-week to 90 million, compared with a 20.4% decline for the industry. The figure stood at 150 million in July 2026 and 156 million in the first quarter of FY27.

Also read: CAS chaos splits Sensex and Nifty: How long will this last?

Despite the drop in contracts, the premium generated per contract surged 74.8% week-on-week to Rs 2,605. This compares with Rs 1,688 in July 2026 and Rs 1,902 in Q1 FY27.

The increase in premium per contract helped BSE’s average daily premium turnover value rise 21.3% week-on-week to Rs 23,500 crore, significantly ahead of the 9.5% growth recorded by the industry. The figure was also above Nuvama’s remaining FY27E ADPTV estimate of Rs 21,800 crore. As a result, BSE’s ADPTV market share rose to 37.1%, an increase of 362 basis points week-on-week.
For FY27 so far, BSE’s average daily premium turnover value stands at around Rs 28,200 crore, while its ADPTV market share is around 35.2%. Its premium-to-notional turnover value ratio stands at around 12.6 basis points, compared with 17.6 basis points for the industry.

What is CAS?

Market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) introduced the Closing Auction Session (CAS) for eligible Futures & Options (F&O) stocks which started on August 3. The new framework changes how closing prices are determined for these stocks and extends equity derivatives trading by 10 minutes.

For investors, the biggest change is this: the closing price of eligible F&O stocks will no longer be calculated using trades executed during the final 30 minutes of the trading session. Instead, it will be discovered through a dedicated auction held after continuous trading ends.

Simply put, CAS is a 20-minute auction that begins after continuous trading ends. Instead of executing every trade instantly as it happens during the trading day, all buy and sell orders are pooled together and matched at one common price. That single price becomes the stock’s official closing price.

Timing chronology starting 3:15 p.m.

The process begins before the auction starts. Between 3 p.m. and 3:15 p.m., exchanges will calculate the volume weighted average price (VWAP) of trades in every eligible stock. At 3:15 p.m., continuous trading in eligible stocks ends, and the market shifts into CAS.

For the next five minutes, until 3:20 p.m., no fresh orders can be placed as the market transitions into the auction. From 3:20 p.m. to 3:25 p.m., investors can place both market and limit orders.

Read more: CAS sparks trader backlash as losses mount, Sebi holds firm

From 3:20 p.m. to 3:25 p.m., investors can place both market and limit orders. Between 3:25 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., only limit orders can be entered. Market orders placed earlier cannot be modified or cancelled during this phase. To prevent a flurry of last-second orders, the order entry window will not close at a fixed time. Instead, it will shut randomly between 3:28 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Once the order entry window closes, exchanges will stop accepting orders and begin matching buy and sell orders between 3:30 p.m. and 3:35 p.m. All successful trades will be executed at a single equilibrium price, which will become the stock’s official closing price.

The objective is to make the closing price more representative of overall market demand and supply. By bringing together all buy and sell orders at the close, the auction is designed to improve liquidity, help execute large orders more efficiently and arrive at a more robust closing price.

The framework is also intended to make it harder for large trades placed in the final minutes of the session to disproportionately influence stock and index closing levels.

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