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Global fund managers are reassessing their retreat from Indian equities as a swift drop in oil prices to pre‑Iran war levels and measures to stabilize the rupee have soothed key pain points for investment in Asia’s third largest economy.

Exchange data shows daily selling by global funds has slowed markedly in recent weeks. Meanwhile, analysis by Elara Capital reveals that inflows into U.S.-listed India-focused exchange traded funds turned positive last week for the first time in more than a month.

“Two key headwinds have eased,” said Todd McClone, a portfolio manager at William Blair Investment ‌Management, which oversees about $65 ⁠billion.

“India is ⁠among the most oversold markets we track,” he said. “This macro improvement, alongside a more attractive valuation premium, strengthens the case to act.”

India imports nearly 90% of its crude requirements, making it one of the world’s most vulnerable economies to the Middle East oil shock. Those high energy costs alongside sustained foreign selling of Indian assets pushed the rupee to a record low in May, depressing returns for foreign currency holders.

Overseas investors cited stretched valuations alongside FX and oil risks for reallocating capital elsewhere. India’s fall from grace also coincided with a global rotation into technology-heavy markets, with South Korea and Taiwan emerging as particular winners of the AI boom.
Average allocations to India among emerging market ⁠funds dropped ‌below 10% in April for the first time since early 2021, from a peak of 17.5% in August of 2024, according to figures from Copley Fund Research. Now though, the tide may be turning, with currency and crude pressures easing, ⁠and valuations in high-tech stocks showing signs of excess.

“We have gradually reduced our India underweight in the pan-Asia strategies,” primarily by doubling down on existing high-conviction holdings, said Vikas Pershad, a portfolio manager at M&G, which manages roughly $450 billion.

The additional capital was freed up by scaling back positions in South Korea and Taiwan, he said.

RUPEE RECOVERY

The rupee, which had been under sustained pressure for months, found relief not only from crude’s retreat, but from central bank measures to encourage dollar inflows.

The Indian currency has recovered to around 94.50 per dollar from an all-time low near 97 on May 20 to be among the best-performing Asian currencies in June.

The rupee’s weakness had depressed dollar returns, leaving the MSCI India index sharply trailing emerging ‌market peers.

Christina Woon, head of equity income at Eastspring Investments, which oversees $270 billion, said she is “incrementally more positive” on India.

“Valuation opportunities have opened up over the past few months, so on a selective basis, we would be keen to engage,” she said.

SPOTLIGHT ON EARNINGS

Still, many fund managers ⁠caution that a long-term rerating of the market would require earnings support.

“Improved currency stability and lower oil prices alone are unlikely to change investors views on Indian equities in the near term, though they may provide a more supportive macro backdrop,” said Peeyush Mittal, a portfolio manager at Matthews Asia, which has about $7.7 billion under management.

India’s earnings growth has been limited to single digits in the past two fiscal years. However, analysts predict that will accelerate to the mid-teens in the current and coming fiscal year.

“India is not a low-growth or broken story, but it is a market where valuations remain relatively full,” said Ninghui Liu, head of APAC investment strategy at State Street Investment Management, which manages $5.6 trillion.

“So the bar for increasing allocation is quite clear: We need to see sustained earnings recovery coming through.”

QuickBooks Online is operating normally as of Tuesday morning, according to the latest status checks from Intuit’s official monitoring page and independent outage-tracking services, though a small number of users have reported scattered issues over the past 24 hours.

StatusGator, a third-party service that monitors the uptime of QuickBooks and thousands of other cloud-based platforms, last checked QuickBooks’ status at 9:10 a.m. UTC Tuesday and found the service operational. The site noted three user-submitted reports of potential outages within the preceding 24-hour window, a relatively low volume that falls within the range typically associated with isolated, individual connectivity problems rather than a widespread service disruption. A separate StatusGator monitor tracking the Intuit QuickBooks Online API specifically reported the service operational as of its most recent check Monday afternoon, with five user-submitted reports logged over the prior day.

Intuit, QuickBooks’ parent company, maintains its own official status page where the company posts real-time updates on outages, degraded performance and scheduled maintenance across its various products. According to that page, the most recent disruption affected QuickBooks Online users on June 18, when some customers experienced an error related to sales tax calculations while attempting to save invoices and transactions. Intuit confirmed that issue had been resolved as of June 18 and apologized for any inconvenience it caused. Since that incident, the company’s status history shows no further reported outages for QuickBooks Online itself, though several rounds of planned maintenance have been scheduled and completed for related products in the QuickBooks ecosystem.

Among those scheduled maintenance windows, QuickBooks Time, the company’s time-tracking and workforce management tool, underwent planned maintenance from 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. Pacific time on June 28, with Intuit noting the work was intended to be brief and apologizing in advance for any disruption. That maintenance window has since concluded. A separate maintenance period for QuickBooks Online itself was logged on June 22, lasting roughly two and a half hours, part of a recurring pattern of brief, planned overnight maintenance windows the company has used periodically throughout June to perform system updates without significantly affecting daytime business hours for most users.

Independent outage trackers have offered a broadly consistent picture in recent days, even as individual user reports continue to surface intermittently, which is typical for any large-scale cloud software platform serving millions of small businesses. Outage-monitoring service Outage.Report indicated QuickBooks Online was functioning normally, noting that report volume remained within the typical range expected for the time of day and that the platform’s last confirmed significant incident occurred roughly six months ago. That service also noted zero outage signals detected within the most recent 24-hour window at the time of its last check.

For users currently experiencing problems with QuickBooks Online, Intuit recommends checking the company’s official status page first to determine whether an outage or scheduled maintenance event has already been logged. If an issue appears on that page, it indicates the company is aware of the problem and actively working toward a resolution. Users can also subscribe to receive automatic notifications whenever a service status changes, alerting them when an outage begins or when systems return to normal operation. For issues that don’t appear on the official status page, Intuit suggests visiting the QuickBooks Community forum, where other users frequently report and discuss similar problems in real time, and where members of the QuickBooks support team regularly post updates and troubleshooting guidance.

QuickBooks Online, developed by Intuit, serves as cloud-based accounting software used widely by small and medium-sized businesses to manage invoicing, expense tracking, payroll processing and financial reporting. Given how central the platform has become to daily financial operations for millions of businesses, even brief outages or partial disruptions can create significant downstream complications, delaying invoice processing, payroll runs and financial reporting deadlines for companies that rely on the service as their primary accounting system.

Historical data compiled by outage trackers underscores how frequently large cloud platforms like QuickBooks experience some level of disruption, even if most incidents are brief and narrowly scoped. StatusGator’s records show it has tracked more than 400 distinct outages affecting QuickBooks users since it began monitoring the service in 2019, spanning everything from brief login failures to more significant disruptions affecting core accounting functions. Past incidents have included problems with invoice printing and sending, sales tax calculation errors, and login access issues, the kinds of disruptions that tend to generate the highest volume of user complaints given how directly they interfere with day-to-day business operations.

For businesses that depend heavily on uninterrupted access to QuickBooks Online, particularly around sensitive periods like payroll processing or invoice deadlines, outage history suggests it remains worthwhile to monitor both Intuit’s official status page and independent tracking services during any reported slowdown, since crowdsourced monitoring tools have at times detected and flagged emerging issues before they were formally acknowledged on a company’s own status page. As of this report, however, no active outage has been confirmed for QuickBooks Online, and the platform appears to be functioning as expected for the vast majority of users.

Sephora is bringing “quiet hours” to all of its U.S. stores, the latest sign that major retailers are investing in sensory-friendly shopping experiences aimed at making stores more accessible for neurodivergent customers.

The beauty retailer announced that during designated quiet hours, stores will lower music volume, adjust in-store digital screens and minimize strong scents to create a calmer shopping environment. Sephora has not announced a nationwide schedule for the quieter shopping periods.

The nationwide rollout follows a pilot program at 32 Sephora stores across eight markets. The company said it developed the initiative alongside disability advocacy organization Open Inclusion and consultancy Purposeful Futures after gathering feedback from neurodivergent and sensory-sensitive beauty shoppers.

“Quiet Hours at Sephora is one meaningful step in our ongoing commitment to building more welcoming environments for our employees, consumers, and communities,” Deborah Yeh, Sephora’s global chief marketing officer, said in a statement.

SEPHORA’S BEAUTY INSIDER PROGRAM: HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR BENEFITS

The move comes as retailers increasingly view accessibility initiatives as both a customer service effort and a way to reach a broader customer base.

Walmart became the first major U.S. retailer to permanently introduce daily sensory-friendly shopping hours nationwide in 2023 after testing the concept during the back-to-school season. The retailer now offers the quieter shopping experience from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. local time each day, turning off overhead music, dimming lights where possible and displaying static images on television screens.

At the time, Walmart said the decision to make the program permanent followed overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers and employees, including associates with autism and ADHD.

“From face-to-face conversations, emails, listening sessions, social media and our personal experiences in the stores, we have seen what these changes mean for our customers and associates,” Walmart executives Denise Malloy Deaderick, Cedric Clark and Alvis Washington wrote when announcing the nationwide expansion.

DC RESTAURANT OFFERING ‘QUIET HOURS’ FOR PATRONS LOOKING TO ESCAPE BRUNCH ‘PARTY AMBIANCE’

Other retailers have also experimented with sensory-friendly shopping. Target has tested quieter shopping hours at select stores by dimming lights, limiting overhead announcements and reducing music, while Toys “R” Us has offered “Quiet Hour” events at some locations.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
LVMUY	LVMH MOËT HENNESSY LOUIS VUITTON SE	110.6	-2.34	-2.07%

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Outside traditional retail, Chuck E. Cheese has operated its monthly “Sensory Sensitive Sundays” program at participating locations since 2016, opening early with dimmed lights, reduced sound and a calmer environment for families.

The programs are designed to reduce sensory triggers such as loud music, bright lighting and other in-store distractions that can make shopping more challenging for some customers.

The US government has lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools, just weeks after ordering it to restrict access to them over national security concerns, the company has said.

Anthropic said in a social media post that it will begin restoring access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Wednesday after being notified that the US Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on the two models.

They are the firm’s most advanced AI tools, which were abruptly suspended on 12 June over concerns that they could be used by hackers to exploit weaknesses in computer systems.

The BBC has contacted the Department of Commerce for comment.

Mythos and Fable are two of Anthropic’s AI models built on its Claude platform – a rival to the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Fable 5 is a version of the AI model for the cosumer market, capable of deep reasoning and can perform complex tasks independently.

Mythos 5 is a version of the platform designed for businesses and cybersecurity experts. It is said to be able to identify vulnerabilities in computer code and exploit them.

The firm previously said that US authorities had not pinpointed specific concerns about its technology even as it ordered both platforms to be suspended around the world.

“Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” the company said at the time, referring to a process of slipping past software safety restrictions to unblock features.

“However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”

US President Donald Trump made more than $1bn (£750m) last year from business dealings in cryptocurrency, according to his mandatory financial report for 2025.

In a 927-page disclosure, he reported $635m in royalties from a Trump meme coin that has plunged in value since he launched it three days before taking office.

He also reported over $500m in income from World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm founded by his own sons and the children of his special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

He earned millions more from real estate, Trump-themed Bibles, watches and other items. But the White House denied he was profiting from the presidency.

Much of the income was from transactions with World Liberty Financial, a venture from which Trump and family members receive 75% of the company’s proceeds.

It represents a significant increase in moneymaking compared with Trump’s 2024 financial disclosure, when he disclosed over $600m in income.

But White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly rejected any suggestion of ethical concerns and said Trump had proudly made the US “the crypto capital of the world”.

“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged – or will ever engage – in conflicts of interest,” she said in a statement.

She added: “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people – and any so-called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade.”