The National Stock Exchange’s long-awaited IPO, expected to raise around Rs 30,000 crore, moved a step closer to launch after Sebi approved the exchange’s draft offer document on Friday, according to the regulator’s website.

The approval clears a key regulatory step for the proposed listing. This comes as activity in India’s IPO market has picked up following a subdued first half of the year.

Here’s everything investors should know:

1.) IPO Details

The proposed IPO is entirely an offer-for-sale (OFS) of up to 14.89 crore equity shares with a face value of Re 1 each, representing nearly 6% of NSE’s paid-up equity capital. The issue size has been fixed at 6% of the exchange’s paid-up capital.

The Economic Times reported citing sources that National Stock Exchange is likely to price its IPO at around Rs 1,800 per share or slightly above.

The company will likely announce the price band on September 15, according to a person aware of the development.

If everything goes as per the schedule, the IPO is likely to open around September 18, while listing may occur around September 25.

2.) Where will the NSE shares be listed?

NSE’s shares will be listed on BSE, mirroring the arrangement under which BSE’s own shares are listed on NSE.

3.) NSE Valuation

Analysts say the exchange is already commanding premium valuations in the unlisted market. “NSE remains a capital-light near-monopoly. At around Rs 1,970-2,000 in the unlisted market, it trades near 45x FY26 earnings.

That’s rich, but below BSE at around 70x and MCX at around 80x,” Nitant Darekar, research analyst at Bonanza had said earlier.

4.) 7 PSUs sell stake

Seven public sector entities, including State Bank of India (SBI), Bank of Baroda, Stock Holding Corporation, GIC, New India Assurance, National Insurance Company, and United Insurance Company, are set to partially monetise their holdings in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) through the bourse’s long-awaited initial public offering (IPO).

According to NSE’s Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) filed with market regulator SEBI, the seven government-owned entities together hold approximately 7.97 crore shares that are part of the proposed offer for sale (OFS).

Other shareholders include MS Strategic (Mauritius), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Aranda Investments (Mauritius) Ptd.

5.) LIC, others retain stake

Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), one of NSE’s key shareholders, will not be participating in the share sale. Premji Invest, which holds a 2.35% stake, and investor Radhakishan Damani, who owns 1.58%, are also not selling any shares, according to the DRHP.

6.) NSE financials

NSE reported a 7% year-on-year increase in profit for the June quarter, supported by higher transaction charges and strong operating margins. Net income stood at Rs 3,120 crore in Q1, while total income rose 9% YoY to Rs 5,252 crore.

Analysts, however, have cautioned investors about the exchange’s dependence on derivatives trading volumes. Earnings remain closely linked to activity in the derivatives segment, which can be volatile, particularly following regulatory changes in the futures and options market.

NSE’s IPO is expected to be one of the marquee issues of 2026, alongside Jio Platforms. Investment bankers expect September to remain a busy month for primary markets, with IPOs worth nearly $4 billion lined up, including the anticipated NSE offering.

7.) World’s largest derivatives exchange

According to the World Federation of Exchanges, NSE retained its position as the world’s largest equity derivatives exchange, with more than 36.99 billion contracts traded during Fiscal 2026, including activity on NSE International Exchange (NSEIX).

As of March 31, 2026, the exchange was also the largest in India by total cash market turnover and the third-largest globally by number of cash equity trades, according to the World Federation of Exchanges.

8.) NSE IPO history

The filing marks the culmination of a listing process first initiated in December 2016, when NSE filed its first DRHP for a Rs 10,000-crore issue.

The process was subsequently stalled due to the co-location controversy.

9.) NSE unilisted market share price

NSE currently trades in the unlisted market at around Rs 1,975-2,000 per share, implying a valuation of roughly Rs 5 lakh crore.

That would make it one of the most valuable listed financial institutions in India once the public issue is completed.

10.) NSE dividend history

NSE is India’s largest stock exchange in terms of cash market turnover, equity derivatives turnover and exchange-traded currency derivatives turnover. NSE’s strong and consistent cash generation is reflected in its shareholder payouts.

The exchange paid a dividend of Rs 35 per share in both FY25 and FY26, while the FY24 dividend stood at Rs 18 per share on a bonus-adjusted basis.

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

SEATTLE — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has issued a stark warning about artificial intelligence’s potential to permanently eliminate large numbers of jobs, calling on governments to prepare now for widespread labor disruption rather than waiting for the market to sort out the fallout on its own.

In a nearly 5,900-word essay titled “The turbulent AI era is here,” published last month on his personal website, Gates Notes, Gates argued that AI differs fundamentally from earlier labor-saving technologies because it threatens to substitute for the very cognitive work that historically created new jobs as older ones disappeared, such as when workers moved away from farms and factories over the past century.

“We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates,” Gates wrote in the essay.

Gates identified sales, customer support, software engineering and paralegal work among the white-collar occupations most likely to face early disruption from AI systems, alongside tasks such as assessing loan applications, analyzing data and triaging patients. He expressed particular concern for younger workers entering a labor market with fewer entry-level openings than previous generations encountered.

“I worry about my grandkids, as robots increasingly take on entry-level functions,” Gates wrote, according to CNBC’s account of the essay. “It’s hard to move up the ladder when there is no bottom step to help you get on that ladder.”

Beyond white-collar work, Gates said he expects increasingly capable robots to begin competing for physical tasks in construction and hospitality by the end of the decade, extending AI’s disruptive potential well beyond office-based cognitive work. He acknowledged that public skepticism about robotics may currently be shaped by viral videos of robots performing clumsily, but argued that underlying capability is advancing faster than casual observers might assume.

To address the coming disruption, Gates outlined three central proposals in his essay. The first calls for new governance institutions, both domestic and international, capable of coordinating AI policy across employment, education, taxation, health, security and energy simultaneously, rather than leaving individual government agencies to manage separate pieces of the transition independently. Gates has pointed to elements of nuclear inspection regimes, international aviation regulation and environmental treaties as potential models for the kind of international cooperation he believes will ultimately be necessary, while acknowledging that building such a framework would take years and require difficult cooperation among major world powers.

Gates’s second proposal, which he calls “Human Reserved,” suggests that societies should deliberately set aside certain jobs or tasks for humans even in cases where machines become technically capable of performing them. Gates has compared the concept to a nature reserve, land that could technically be developed but is deliberately left alone because the long-term cost of development would outweigh any short-term benefit.

Gates cited caregiving as a clear example of work he believes should remain human-reserved, drawing directly on his own family’s experience. His father received round-the-clock care before dying of Alzheimer’s disease in 2020, an experience Gates said shaped his thinking on the issue significantly.

“Something in the care they gave my dad was irreplaceably human,” Gates wrote. “No robot could or should have done it.”

Gates offered a similar example involving the delivery of difficult medical news, arguing that certain moments carry human significance beyond pure technical efficiency.

“There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t,” Gates wrote regarding the prospect of a robot delivering a terminal diagnosis. “Yet it shouldn’t.”

Gates has acknowledged significant unresolved questions surrounding how a Human Reserved system would actually function in practice, including who would decide which jobs qualify for protection and how authorities would prevent companies from circumventing such restrictions. According to reporting from GeekWire, Gates said these details “will need to be worked out in public,” and revealed he has been actively discussing potential implementation approaches with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, including exploring ways to reserve as much as 40% of overall work for humans through measures such as shorter workdays and earlier retirement to help redistribute remaining employment.

Gates’s third major proposal involves shifting a portion of the tax burden away from human labor and toward automation, specifically by taxing AI computing usage, sometimes referred to as tokens, along with robots themselves.

“I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots,” Gates wrote, according to HR Executive’s coverage of the essay.

Gates argued that the current tax structure creates a built-in incentive favoring automation over human employment, since employers pay payroll taxes when hiring workers but can typically write off the cost of a robot as an immediate business expense. He said a targeted tax on AI and robotic labor could help modestly slow the pace of substitution while generating revenue to fund worker retraining programs and a stronger social safety net, though he specified that such a tax should not impede AI applications that make medicine and education more affordable.

Gates was careful throughout the essay to frame his proposals as starting points for public debate rather than fully developed policy plans. He did not specify a tax rate, a taxable unit, or a collection mechanism for his proposed automation tax, and acknowledged that measuring AI usage across cloud services, internally developed models and mixed human-machine workflows would present significant practical challenges.

Independent labor market research offers a narrower and more preliminary picture than Gates’s broader forecast. A Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper, revised Aug. 12, analyzed ADP payroll records covering millions of U.S. workers through June and found that employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations ran 19% below where it would have been expected to track based on less-exposed peers, while experienced workers in the same fields showed no comparable employment gap. The researchers characterized their findings as early descriptive indicators rather than definitive proof of AI-driven job losses, noting that the divergence occurred primarily through reduced hiring rather than increased layoffs, and that similar effects appeared less pronounced in broader national survey data.

Critics of Gates’s automation tax proposal have raised concerns about potential unintended economic consequences. Robert Seamans, an associate professor of management at New York University, has argued that existing empirical evidence suggests robots generally boost productivity growth, meaning a tax specifically targeting robotic automation could inadvertently limit broader productivity gains at a time when many economies are already grappling with sluggish growth.

Gates has characterized the overall stakes of the current moment in stark terms, describing the odds of a net negative outcome from the ongoing AI transition as “very high” absent meaningful policy intervention. As of early September, his proposals remain firmly in the realm of public debate rather than enacted policy, with the central open questions being whether governments will translate his ideas into concrete legislative proposals, and whether broader employment data in the months ahead will eventually confirm the kind of structural labor market disruption Gates has warned is coming.

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.

The Nifty 50 has gone unusually quiet, but history suggests investors may not have much longer to enjoy the calm. The index recorded 21 trading sessions with daily movements of less than 1% in August 2026, an exceptionally subdued stretch that could precede a sharp expansion in volatility. The direction of the next move remains unclear, but the magnitude could be significant.

“Such periods of extreme calm have not necessarily indicated whether the next major move would be upward or downward, but they have often preceded a meaningful increase in market movement,” said Raj Gaikar, equity research analyst at SAMCO Securities.

Gaikar analysed 6,630 trading days across 320 calendar months since January 2000 and found only eight months in which the Nifty did not record a single daily move of plus or minus 1% or more.

That makes August’s market behaviour a rare event, occurring roughly once in every 40 months.

The previous instances were June 2017, July 2018, December 2019, June 2021, April 2023, and July, September and December 2025. All eight occurred after 2017, with no similar episode recorded during the first 17 years of the dataset.

Also Read | Value stocks are making a comeback in India. These 10 stocks could benefit

Big move, uncertain direction

The immediate aftermath of these calm periods was not necessarily dramatic. The Nifty’s average one-month forward return was 1.22%, with the index ending higher in five of the eight instances.The three-month performance, however, was far more volatile. Returns ranged from a decline of 29.34% to a gain of 12.06%. Six of the eight episodes were followed by a move of more than 5% in either direction.

That historical pattern makes the current setup less a bullish or bearish signal than a warning about the market’s compressed trading range.

“With August 2026 now joining this rare list, the data suggests that the Nifty may be entering another phase where volatility could return after an extended period of consolidation,” Gaikar said.

The August calculation excludes the 1.60% market move on Aug. 3, which was attributed to the introduction of the new Closing Auction Session and occurred during the closing auction.

The subdued index performance comes as strategists increasingly expect returns to become more dependent on earnings delivery and individual stock performance.

Axis Securities said its investment strategy for September should shift “from index-level positioning towards earnings-led stock selection.” The brokerage said the broader market had already benefited from domestic liquidity and better-than-expected earnings growth.

Going forward, it expects companies with visible earnings growth, strong cash flows, credible capital-expenditure plans and improving return ratios to outperform.

Axis Securities raised its December 2026 Nifty target to 27,360 after upgrading its Nifty earnings estimates for FY27 and FY28 by 0.3% each. Its target is based on 19.5 times December 2027 estimated earnings.

The brokerage remains constructive on Indian equities, citing macroeconomic fundamentals, government capital expenditure, GST 2.0 reforms and an improving corporate earnings cycle. But it also advised investors to maintain diversified portfolios and reduce concentration in expensive stocks.

Anand Shah, CIO – PMS & AIF, ICICI Prudential Alternate Investments, echoed that view. “We expect returns to become increasingly earnings-led and stock-specific rather than driven by broad-based multiple expansion,” Shah said.

His concerns include higher crude oil prices and currency weakness, which could create imported inflationary pressures. The investment approach, he said, remains focused on companies with visible earnings growth, resilient balance sheets, cash-generative operations and reasonable valuations.

Foreign investor activity has also improved after a prolonged period of selling. Arihant Bardia, CIO and founder of Valtrust, said foreign portfolio investors turned buyers in July after four consecutive months of selling and continued buying in August. FPIs bought ₹20,200 crore in July and ₹29,631 crore in August, he said.

“If the recent improvement in FPI flows sustains, we could see a meaningful rerating of select large caps, particularly private banks,” Bardia said.

That potential return of foreign demand could provide support to parts of the large-cap market. But Bardia also expects earnings delivery, rather than liquidity alone, to drive returns.

The same shift is visible across the broader market strategy. While Axis Securities expects Nifty earnings to grow at a 13% compound annual rate between FY23 and FY28, it warned that geopolitical tensions, crude oil volatility and currency movements could still generate near-term turbulence.

The message from the market’s unusual August calm is therefore straightforward: the Nifty may be quiet, but the risk environment is not. History does not reveal whether the next move will be higher or lower. It does suggest that the current lack of movement may not last.

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

A charity is hosting a music event to fund a project that helps families with the costs of Christmas.

The Greenaway Foundation provides families in Kent, Sussex and Surrey with ingredients for a two-course Christmas dinner to help with the costs of the festive season.

The organisation hosts a music festival, Greenaway Live, at Crawley Rugby Club from 15:00 BST on Saturday, with ticket sales helping fund its work for families struggling financially.

Darren Greenaway, who founded the charity, said the Christmas project was “getting bigger and bigger, so this year we need to raise about £200,000”.

As part of the charity’s festive work, children from low-income families can make a “make a wish for a Christmas present”, which the organisation delivers on Christmas Eve.

It expects to support over 1,000 families in 2026, and Greenway said some parents would “break down and cry when we turn up and make the delivery”.

The first Greenway Live was held in 2025. The second year of the event will be streamed on the charity’s social media.

“I was on my honeymoon trying to arrange it,” Greenway told the BBC.

“This year we said we’d try again and obviously it seems to be getting more and more traction, so we’ve all now started planning towards next year.”

He added: “All the live acts are donating their time for free, so it’s a mini Live Aid.”

Follow BBC Sussex on Facebook, external, on X, external, and on Instagram, external and listen to BBC Radio Sussex on Sounds. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk, external or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250.