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Mr. TVK Vivek Kumar, Managing Partner at Bestpals Research and Advisory LLP, was searching for investment opportunities during the lockdown period following COVID-19. The stock markets witnessed a crash and most stocks were trading at decade-low prices. Mr. Kumar identified this as an opportunity for investment and wealth creation. He started scanning the stocks related to different sectors like Retail, Fast Moving Consumer Goods, E-commerce, and soon discovered the agricultural equipment and machinery sector stocks may offer attractive opportunities. He collected data related to the agricultural machinery sector and details of Indian companies operating in the Agricultural Machinery and Farm equipment sector. After reviewing the company profiles, he concluded that Escorts Ltd. and VST Tillers Tractors Ltd. were less diversified companies that mostly focused on manufacturing agricultural equipment. Upon analyzing the financial performance of the two companies, he was unable to decide which of these two companies for investments had the potential to deliver better returns. The goal was to identify Value or Growth stocks for a short-term investment horizon of 12-18 months, as he had no idea what the long-term outlook might be in the post-COVID-19 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To protect market integrity, regulators across the globe have applied trading constraining mechanisms like market-wide circuit-breakers, price limits, stock-based trading halts and the like. In June 2001, Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) introduced the market-wide circuit-breaker mechanism for Indian markets in a similar manner to other markets. Till date the Indian market has applied these marketwide circuit-breakers six times. This study attempts to examine the impact of market-wide circuit-breakers on trading activity and volatility. We consider data of Nifty closing price, turnover and number of shares traded for six different windows with event day, event plus 1-3 days, and 10 days average. The study estimates intraday return, overnight return high low volatility and day time volatility followed by T-test to measure the significance difference between average turnover, number of shares traded, high low and daily volatility with event day. The study finds that the effect of market-wide circuit-breaker continues up to three post-event days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shareholder value maximization has become the predominant goal of corporations in India and the world over. This goal has gained further importance and focus in the recent years because of the demands made by financial institutional investors, financial markets and competitors on companies to perform and work towards continuous sustainable growth in shareholders' value. To achieve such goals, it is important for companies to device performance measures that are aligned towards the corporate goal of shareholder value enhancement. Many consulting firms have come up with different measures of performance such as Economic Value Added (EVA), cash flow return on investment, and Total Shareholder Return (TSR) to cater to the above need. Of these measures, EVA has become popular in India. The proponents of EVA, Stern Stewart and Co., claim that EVA is superior to other metrics, as it is the financial performance measure that comes closer than any other measure, in capturing the true economic profit of an enterprise, helps managers to make better decisions and motivates them to perform better. A plethora of academic research studies verifying the claims of the proponents have been conducted. The objective of this paper is to present different performance measures available, classify empirical studies carried out on EVA, focus on studies that evaluate the superiority of EVA over other measures, its utility and application, present their findings, and examine the possible reasons for inconsistency in the findings, methodology adopted for study and suggest avenues for future research in this area. This is done through a review of literature of the past two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]