Your go-to place to understand what's happening in the Indian stock market and why. No drama, no nonsense — just insights.
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Aug 26 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
From Japan's demographic challenge, let's turn to India where the picture looks very different. The share of working women in India, particularly in manufacturing, has been stagnating.
This isn't just about diversity - higher female participation is key to economic development. 🧵👇
Women in India face barriers from family attitudes to workplace discrimination. But there's also a legal side. Many Indian laws actively prohibit women from some work - like night shifts. Delhi bans women from working after 9 PM in summer, 8 PM in winter.
Aug 25 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
We've talked a lot about oil on The Daily Brief, Russian oil, global crude prices, and what not. But there's a completely different type of oil that's equally important to India's economy and your daily life, edible oil. The stuff you use to cook your dal and fry your samosas.🧵👇
In February 2025, after skyrocketing over the last 2 decades, India's edible oil imports hit a 4-year low. The government has been playing around with import duties, slashing them from 20% to 10% just in May to control food inflation.
Aug 22 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
8 years ago, India promised "one nation, one tax" with GST. Today, as the government prepares GST 2.0 as a potential "Diwali gift," the reality is more complex. While GST expanded the tax base dramatically, it created new challenges for MSMEs, exporters, and India's middle class.🧵👇
Before GST, doing business across Indian states felt like navigating different countries. A truck from Maharashtra to Tamil Nadu would stop at multiple checkposts, pay different taxes at each border, juggling central excise, state VAT, service tax, and octroi.
Aug 22 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
The Lok Sabha just passed India's most sweeping gaming legislation in 7 minutes, banning all real-money gaming. This isn't just government overreach, it's a complex tale of competing priorities and unintended consequences that will reshape India's digital future.🧵👇
On August 20th, 2025, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw introduced the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill. Passed by voice vote in approximately seven minutes, despite opposition protests demanding detailed debate. But what exactly does this comprehensive ban cover?
Aug 20 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
Remember that late-night Domino's order when nothing else was open? These brands are so embedded in our daily lives that we barely think about the companies running them. But their Q1 results reveal fascinating economics behind fulfilling millions of Indians' cravings daily.🧵👇
We'll examine three Indian QSR giants, Jubilant FoodWorks (Domino's), Westlife Foodworld (McDonald's), and Restaurant Brands Asia (Burger King, Tim Hortons). Their businesses run extremely tight operations to ensure every next meal feels as delightful as the last.
Aug 20 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
India's biggest trading partner just slapped us with a 50% tariff practically out of nowhere. That's a 25% base tariff, plus another 25% because we buy Russian oil, a punishment whose logic we don't quite get. The first 25% is already in force, another 25% kicks in August 27.🧵👇
These tariffs could practically close the world's biggest consumer market to our exports. From shrimp exporters to carpet weavers, some pockets of our economy will see extreme pain. But this situation is terribly confusing, too extreme and sudden for anyone to accurately predict.
Aug 19 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
There's a truism about the Indian economy that everyone seems to know, India's manufacturing sector has been stuck at 15-17% of GDP for decades. This gets repeated so often by us, cabinet ministers, everyone. But what if the entire narrative rests on a measurement error?🧵👇
A provocative paper by economists Bishwanath Goldar and Pilu Chandra Das makes an extraordinary claim, manufacturing has actually boomed to nearly one-third of India's economy, we just don't know how to count it. Here's what we learnt about this complex problem.
Aug 18 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
DHFL was once India's third largest housing finance company with a ₹1 lakh crore loan book. Then investigators discovered something shocking, its most active branch in Bandra Mumbai, responsible for ₹22,000 crore in disbursements, didn't actually exist.🧵👇
For nearly 40 years, DHFL built an empire providing affordable home loans to lower and middle-income Indians. By the mid-2010s, it had a sprawling, India-wide retail network and seemed like one of the most stable variants of the housing finance business.
Aug 14 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
We went through management commentary from 20 companies across 11 industries — India & abroad for The Chatter
Here are the juiciest, most telling things CEOs & CFOs said this quarter 👇
Maruti Suzuki says the small-car era is fading fast and SUVs have taken over the market.
Aug 13 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Indians are drinking, smoking and intoxicating themselves more than they ever have. In just the last decade, spending on alcohol and tobacco has tripled. Rural Indians increased monthly spending from ₹46 to ₹143, urban Indians from ₹42 to ₹157.🧵👇
This increase comes despite the Indian government doing exactly what public health experts recommend, steadily increasing taxes on tobacco and alcohol to make them expensive. Yet Indians are resorting to them more enthusiastically than ever.
Aug 13 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
Picture this, it's Tuesday morning in Gurgaon. Hundreds line up outside a sales office for apartments that don't exist yet. Just a 3D model. Construction starts in months, completion in 3 years. By evening, ₹500 crores in bookings collected. This is India's real estate.🧵👇
Land is the most important raw material in real estate. Developers buy outright, enter joint development agreements, or do redevelopment in cities like Mumbai, partnering with old housing societies to tear down cramped buildings and build modern complexes instead.
Aug 12 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Imagine a scorching 45°C day during growing season in rural India. While city folks find relief in AC, this single day ripples through rural families' lives in profound ways, affecting what they eat, how they work, spend money, and survive.🧵👇
New research by Paul Stainier, Manisha Shah and Alan Berreca surveyed 3 lakh rural households across India from 2003-2012, many growing food for themselves rather than sale. Their question, when extreme heat destroys crops, can families adapt easily?
Aug 12 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
Google just approached the Supreme Court asking it to intervene in a major antitrust case. Our entire digital economy could be at stake, potentially changing how Indians pay for Android apps and how app developers run their businesses.🧵👇
At its heart, the case concerns Google's control over Android, the operating system behind almost all of India's smartphones, and its controversial requirement that app developers can only use Google's payment systems, paying commissions as high as 30%.
Aug 11 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
India just hit 20% ethanol-blending in petrol, but not everyone's celebrating. While it sounds like progress, this milestone has sparked intense debate. What's the real promise of ethanol-blending, and do the benefits justify the costs?🧵👇
The fuel in your car today isn't what it was a decade ago. Once, petrol was purely refined from crude oil. Now we're adding ethanol, the same alcohol found in liquor, created by fermenting grain, fruit, or nectar until sugars turn into alcohol.
Aug 11 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Something remarkable just happened in Indian corporate boardrooms. After nine years of silence, Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran sat down with SP Group chairman Shapoor Mistry for a private meeting. No public details, but the very fact they're talking is monumental.🧵👇
This represents a potential breakthrough in one of India's ugliest corporate disputes. Two old Parsi business families, once cordial partners, had devolved into unending legal fights and public disagreements. Could this mark a new chapter for India's most beloved conglomerate?
Aug 10 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
From inflation and factory output to jobs, corporate earnings, and more. Let's track the pulse of the Indian economy through high-frequency indicators and some other data points. 🧵👇
Let's start with something that has been a hot topic for the last few years: inflation.
Retail inflation cooled to 2.1% in June 2025—the lowest in six years. The big driver was food prices, which slipped 0.2% year-on-year.
Aug 9 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
When Trump began announcing his tariffs, we at Markets lost our minds for a bit.
This was a sudden reversal of the way the world economy ran for decades — and we found ourselves writing a series of frantic pieces trying to understand what this all meant.
But now that a 50% tariff is actually in place, we don’t really know what to say. We have no way of analyzing what happens when the world’s largest market slaps double-digit tariffs at a whim. This isn’t serious economic diplomacy; it’s a shakedown.
And lately, it seems like India has become Trump’s biggest punching bag. See this post, for instance:
Aug 8 • 22 tweets • 5 min read
Here's a fascinating story about making money from electricity price swings. Think tomato traders who buy cheap in the afternoon and sell high next morning, but with batteries and India's power grid. A new report suggests this could generate 17% returns.🧵👇
Picture this, every morning wholesale tomato prices at sabji mandis start high. Restaurants need them for lunch, households for dinner. By afternoon, as supply piles up and buyers thin out, prices crash. Tomato farmers can't find good rates.
Aug 8 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Indian banks just reported Q1FY26 results. Nothing blew us away, no surprises, no drama. But if you zoom out just a bit, the bigger picture starts to look... well, a little bleak. The sector has been quietly sliding, not falling off a cliff, but steadily losing its shine.🧵👇
Today, the banking sector looks like it's walking on thin ice. It's easy to be caught off-guard by these results if you haven't been paying attention. Over the last few quarters, banks have been walking a tightrope, and this quarter shows why.
Aug 6 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
JSW Cement's IPO opens August 7th, and it's a fascinating story of a small player trying to crack an industry dominated by giants with much greater "aukat" (as their own MD admits). Here's why this cement IPO matters for understanding India's brutal infrastructure game.🧵👇
The numbers tell the story, existing investors are cashing out ₹2,000 crore while ₹1,600 crore goes to the company. This could be the booster shot JSW Cement needs to break out of its blues in an industry where scale, geography, and timing matter more than marketing gloss.
Aug 4 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
India's about to witness its largest-ever REIT IPO. Knowledge Realty Trust is raising ₹4,800 crore from the public — making it the third-largest IPO of any asset class this year, ahead even of NSDL. But here's what makes REITs completely different creatures from regular stocks.🧵👇
A REIT gives investors a way to invest in big-ticket real estate without buying buildings or worrying about tenants ghosting on rent. Think mutual fund, but instead of pooling money for stocks, you're pooling money for real estate — office parks, malls, warehouses.