Ranjeet Singh

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months . That is the actual wording used by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the private, non-profit body whose Business Cycle Dating Committee officially dates US recessions. Notice what is not in that sentence: GDP, quarters, or any formula at all. The famous "two consecutive quarters of falling GDP" line is a rule of thumb the press adopted decades ago — a useful shorthand that has been flatly wrong in both directions. The 2001 recession was official without two negative quarters in a row. The f…

NEAR is the loudest thing on the crypto tape right now — and it isn't just bitcoin beta. The token changes hands near $3.77 , up about 7% in 24 hours, 59% on the week and 116% over 30 days , on roughly $1.73bn of daily volume against a $4.9bn market cap (CoinGecko, 09:40 IST). More than a third of the float turning over in a day. The Defiant clocked Friday's leg alone at +32% , with NEAR leading the day's movers . What actually happened On 17 September , near.com switched on confidential perpetual futures . Deposits route through a "confidential shard" built on NEAR's Confidential Intents plus a trusted-execution-environment bridge, w…

The Fed's G.17 release landed at 9:15 am ET Friday and the headline looked boring. It wasn't. Industrial production printed flat at 0.0% in August against a +0.3% consensus — and that flat number is hiding a factory sector that went backwards. The numbers Total output was 0.0% month-on-month , missing the +0.3% forecast and slowing from an unrevised +0.2% in July. Year-on-year it's up 1.4% . Manufacturing is the real story. Factory output fell 0.3% against a Reuters poll looking for +0.3% — a 0.6-point miss, and the first decline after seven straight months of gains. It's up just 0.9% from a year ago. The breakdown, as reported by Reuters: Mo…

What happened Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) — the company that used to be MicroStrategy — ripped higher on a day the S&P 500 went nowhere. Investing.com has it closing at $153.92, up 16.39% — a $21.67 day on 50.29m shares, against a 52-week range of $81.81 to $365.21. Yahoo Finance clocked it at $148.55, about +12%, at 11:57 am ET, so the last two hours did real work. Nothing changed inside the company. Bitcoin climbed back above $80,000 at the US open, up about 5.5% in 24 hours and topping $81,000 intraday after weekly lows near $75,000 (CoinDesk). Why it moved 1. Bitcoin bounced, and Strategy's cost base is right there. It holds 845,050 BTC at an…

Volkswagen closed 5.6% lower on Friday after slashing its 2026 profit guidance. The number that did the damage isn't the share price — it's the margin. VW now expects a full-year operating margin of "1% at the most" , down from the 4.0–5.5% it was guiding to. That's the profit of Europe's biggest carmaker compressed into a rounding error. The cause: €10bn (about $11.5bn) of one-off charges, roughly €6bn of it an impairment written off Porsche AG . It's the biggest single entry on today's movers board . Why Porsche is the €6bn hole Porsche's own operating margin was 1.1% last year — for a company whose entire investment case was that s…

What happened Nucor , the largest steelmaker in the United States, is at $249.87, down 5.76% (−$15.27) as reported by StockAnalysis at 10:50 am ET. The trigger landed Thursday after the close: Nucor guided third-quarter earnings to $5.55–$5.65 per diluted share . Analysts sat around $6.17–$6.20 . That gap, roughly 55 to 65 cents a share, is the whole move. Why it moved, when the number itself looks fine Here is what the headline buries. The guide is higher than the quarter before it — Q2 was $5.04 reported, $4.84 adjusted — and more than double the $2.63 of the same quarter in 2025. It is also cleaner, because Q2 carried $130 million of one-o…

Xenon Pharmaceuticals fell about 25% to $42.84 in Friday premarket , against Thursday's $57.35 close — its worst single day since March 2017, per CoinCentral. It went in with a $5.6bn market cap after a 52% gain over the prior year. The trigger landed after Thursday's bell. Xenon voluntarily paused new patient enrolment in its psychiatry programme for azetukalner after reviewing neuropsychiatric adverse events — reported as confusion, somnolence, ataxia and rare cases of psychosis. That covers three Phase 3 X-NOVA studies in major depression (~450 patients each) and two Phase 3 X-CEED studies in bipolar depression (~400 each) . Patients alrea…

The 10-year Treasury yield is knocking on 5% again two days after the Fed's rate hike — yet US futures point higher, with AI-linked megacaps doing the lifting into a quadruple-witching session. Futures now Investing.com reports Dow futures at 51,956 (+0.34%) , S&P 500 futures at 7,669 (+0.41%) and Nasdaq-100 futures at 29,666 (+0.74%) . The driver is the tension between rates and tech: Trading Economics reports the US 10-year at 4.98% , up ~5bp and 33bp higher on the month, after the FOMC lifted the fed funds target to 3.75%–4.00% in a 12–0 vote on Wednesday. Per Charles Schwab, 16 of 19 members pencilled in at least one more hike this year.…

India ended a narrow, mixed session on a third straight day of gains: the Nifty 50 closed up 75.80 points (0.33%) at 23,346.40 while the Sensex slipped 19.63 points (0.03%) to 74,294.96, as a pullback in crude oil and falling global bond yields revived risk appetite — even as IT stocks were sold , per Business Standard. How India closed Nifty 50 — 23,346.40, +75.80 pts (+0.33%) Sensex — 74,294.96, −19.63 pts (−0.03%) Bank Nifty — 56,426, +0.65% (Moneycontrol) Nifty Midcap 100 — +1.23% | Nifty Smallcap 100 — +1.77% India VIX — 11.39, −7.4% (HDFC Sky) The breadth told the real story: benchmarks were flat but the broader market rallied hard, and…

What happened GPT Infraprojects traded at ₹119.13 , up 4.9% , at 3:17 pm IST on Friday, after touching ₹123.32 intraday — about 8.6% above Thursday's close of ₹113.56. Volume ran to 29 lakh shares . The trigger: a ₹483.72 crore railway bridge contract from Rail Vikas Nigam , filed with the exchanges at 6:36 pm on Thursday , after the market had shut. Why it moved — the same bridge has now moved this stock twice The company already told the exchanges about this project on 2 September — but that filing said it had been declared L1 , "first lowest" bidder, at ₹483.7 crore. The stock jumped about 11% that day, to an intraday ₹119.13. L1 i…