Indian stocks third best performers globally

Mumbai, Dec 31 (IANS) After a dismal show a year ago, the Indian stock market emerged as the third best performer globally in 2012, with a return of over 25 percent for a key index on the back of $24 billion foreign fund inflows and robust buying by domestic investors.
The 30-share sensitive index (Sensex) of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) ranked third in terms of returns after the yields of the 50-scrip Thailand Set Index and Germany's 30-share Deutscher Aktien IndeX.
The benchmark Indian index ended the year Monday at 19,426.71 points, 25.70 percent or 3,971.79 points higher than the previous year's close at 15,454.92 points. This is the best performance of the benchmark index since 2009.
The Sensex recorded a high of 19,612.18 points and a low of 15,358.02 points in 2012, data available with the bourse showed.
"Markets gained globally. But Indian market outperformed others because of the reform push that came after September," said Vaibhav Agrawal, vice president, research, Angel Broking.
Agrawal said the government decision to cut subsidies on petroleum products and liberalise overseas investment norms for the sectors like retail, aviation, insurance and banking sent a positive signal to the market.
"Government took some politically difficult decisions. It sent a positive signal to the markets," Agrawal told IANS.
Data with the regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), showed that foreign funds pumped in $24 billion into the Indian markets.
In contrast, foreign funds had divested $357.8 billion from Indian equities and invested $8.65 billion in the debt markets in 2011, while in 2010, their investment in these two segments amounted to $29.36 billion and $10.11 billion, respectively.
Among the individual scrips that comprise the 30-share Sensex basket, the best performer in 2012 was Tata Motors, which surged almost 75 percent on the back of strong performance of its luxury car division Jaguar Land Rover.
The country's largest lender ICICI Bank jumped 66 percent, Maruti Suzuki soared 63 percent and engineering and construction firm Larsen & Toubro gained 61 percent in 2012.
The worst performer in this segment was the country's second largest software exporter Infosys, which slumped 16.5 percent. Gail India fell 8 percent, Bharti Airtel declined 7 percent and BHEL lost 4.5 percent in 2012.
"In 2013, we expect good performance of banking, IT, pharma and auto sectors," said Agrawal.
Anis Chakravarty, director, Deloitte Haskins and Sells, said the overall for the stock markets remained positive for 2013.
"RBI has indicated interest rate cuts. Inflation is showing some moderation. Economic growth is likely to improve. So this should have positive impact on the market," said Chakravarty.
The show at the other major bourse, the National Stock Exchange (NSE), was no different, with the broader 50-share S&P CNX Nifty registering a gain of almost 27 percent. The Nifty ended the year at 5,905.10 points.
However, on last day of the year, key indices closed in the red.
The benchmark Sensex closed 0.09 percent down at 19,426.71 points, while the Nifty declined 0.06 percent to close at 5,905.10 points, in a lacklustre session the last day of 2012 on concern over the US "fiscal cliff".

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Stocks open mixed as budget deadline nears

 Stocks are little changed in early trading on Wall Street as a budget deadline approaches with no deal in sight.
The Dow Jones industrial average was down six points at 12,931 shortly after the opening bell Monday.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index was up two points at 1,405 and the Nasdaq composite edged up 10 points to 2,970.
There are just hours to go before a midnight deadline, when sweeping tax increases and government spending cuts will go into effect unless lawmakers agree on a plan to cut the nation's budget deficit.
More than $500 billion in 2013 tax increases would take effect and $109 billion would be slashed from defense and domestic programs.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says negotiations are ongoing.

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Analysis: For tech investors, it's hard to know when to bolt

When Hewlett-Packard Co agreed to buy British software company Autonomy in August last year for $11.1 billion, two well-known investors made diametrically different bets on how the big deal would play out.
To short seller Jim Chanos, who had been raising red flags on Autonomy for years and had started shorting shares of HP in 2011, the deal was another nail in the coffin of the Silicon Valley tech giant, according to a source familiar with his thinking.
But to activist investor Ralph Whitworth, co-founder of Relational Investors LLC, it was time to commit to HP and the turnaround story the company was trying to sell to Wall Street. His fund bought more than 17.5 million HP shares after the deal was announced, and Whitworth received a seat on the company's board. This year, Relational roughly doubled its stake in HP.
In the wake of HP's decision to take an $8.8 billion write-down on the deal because of alleged accounting irregularities at Autonomy, it appears Chanos - whose call to short Enron before the energy company collapsed in a corporate scandal may be his most famous trade - was more astute.
HP's shares are down 36 percent since Relational, which declined to comment, built its stake in the third quarter of 2011.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY
Relational's big move into HP is a reminder that even smart investors can get things wrong in the fast-evolving technology sector, where once hot global names like Research in Motion and Yahoo can quickly become yesterday's news.
It is a world where a company may effectively erect barriers to entry in a market only to have them torn down by a rival with a new whizz-bang product - just as Apple's iPhone broke the dominance that Research in Motion's BlackBerry had enjoyed.
One warning sign that a tech company may be on the verge of losing its edge is when it makes acquisitions outside of its main area of expertise to move into new product lines. Savvy tech investors also say be wary of companies that experience a succession of management changes, or when a successful core business starts looking tired.
The pace of change in the technology sector is much faster than in other industries, said Kaushik Roy, an analyst at Hercules Technology Growth Capital. "It attracts new talent and capital, many startups are formed, which can be extremely disruptive to incumbents," Roy said. "In other words, yesterday's winners can rapidly become today's losers and vice versa."
In the case of HP, the company not only has had four CEOs since 1999, it has been striving to find another niche to dominate as demand for one of its core products - computer printers - wanes and as its PC business stumbles.
Or consider online search pioneer Yahoo, which has gone through six chief executives and is struggling to keep pace with Google.
Josh Spencer, a portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, said frequent turnover in the executive suite at Yahoo was a warning sign to him. Spencer said he does not own Yahoo shares and has not in the recent past.
RED FLAGS
While a company may view an acquisition as a fresh start - that is what HP was trying to say about Autonomy - some investors see it as a warning the core business is struggling.
Spencer noted that the technology industry's most successful companies - Apple and Samsung - generally have not made acquisitions and instead developed new products internally.
For Margaret Patel, managing director at Wells Capital Management, one of the first red flags she saw at HP was when former CEO Carly Fiorina bought Compaq for roughly $25 billion in 2002.
"I felt then that the acquisition was too large and expensive, and personal computers were not their core strength," said Patel, who has since avoided investing in HP.
Of course, timing can be everything even if an investor is eventually proven right. Patel missed out on a 137 percent gain in HP's stock price from the time of the Compaq deal up until the end of 2010.
PREMIUM VALUATIONS
A few money managers see a flashing yellow light in the big sell-off of Apple shares in the past few months.
Apple, the most valuable U.S. company, has shed nearly 30 percent of its value in the last three months.
Since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs - the driving force behind Apple's iPod, iPhone and iPad - DoubleLine co-founder Jeffrey Gundlach has been recommending that investors short the company's shares because "the product innovator isn't there anymore."
Gundlach said he began shorting Apple's stock at around $610 and maintains that it could drop to $425. He declined to comment on Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs over a year ago and is seen by many as less visionary and innovative than Jobs.
Christian Bertelsen, chief investment officer at Global Financial Private Capital, with assets under management of $1.7 billion, said his firm began paring back its exposure to Apple this fall because he felt the expectations for the company's new iPhone5 had gotten overheated.
He said his firm dramatically took down its exposure to Apple shares when the stock hit $670 a share. "For us, the light bulb went off this fall," he said. Mind you, Apple's shares still remain up about 25 percent for the whole year.
And then there's Research in Motion. Once a leader in smartphones, it's now in danger of becoming irrelevant.
"They saw the move towards all touch-screen phones and didn't move with it," said Stuart Jeffrey, an analyst at Nomura Securities who noted how the BlackBerry 10 touch-screen phone will debut on January 30, 2013, six years after Apple released its first iPhone in 2007.
Robert Stimpson, a portfolio manager at Oak Associates Funds whose fund does not own any shares of Research in Motion, said the company's BlackBerry phones are on a downward slope and it will be tough for the company to regain its lost luster.
"The end of the road is a long, lonely journey," Stimpson said of Research in Motion. "I think they will fight the good fight for many years, probably unsuccessfully.

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The Trouble with Adam Lanza's DNA

In a rare and now controversial investigation, scientists have been asked by Connecticut's medical examiner to study Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's DNA — but the DNA community doesn't think that's such a good idea. Though details on the research are scant, University of Connecticut geneticists will apparently be looking for biological clues that might explain Lanza's extreme violent behavior. The New York Times's Gina Kolata reports that this undertaking is thought to be the first time scientists have studied the genome of a mass killer. Baylor College of Medicine's genetics professor Arthur Beaudet endorses the research, saying, "By studying genetic abnormalities we can learn more about conditions better and who is at risk."
RELATED: Nancy Lanza Reportedly Wasn't a Teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary
But the ethical implications of singling out genetic mutations to explain violent behavior trouble many other scientists, who worry that such research might be held against innocent people who happen to share some of Lanza's genetic features. Harvard Medical School's Dr. Harold Bursztajn told ABC News that he's not sure what the U. Conn geneticists will "even be looking for at this point," considering how thorny and full of false positives the link between genetic markers and violence is. So far, the strongest evidence that genetics play a role in violent behavior comes out of research on MAOA, a gene that produces a substance called monoamine oxidase. Studies from the early '90s showed that abused children with certain variations of this gene had problems regulating their aggressive impulses. But University of Pennsylvania criminologist Adrian Raine questions how crucial MAOA is in determining who actually becomes violent. University of California San Francisco geneticist Robert Nussbaum also worries about the potential for genetic discrimination:
It’s a shot in the dark that’s unlikely to show anything. If they find something associated with autism, I’m afraid that it might have the effect of stigmatizing autistic people. I can see a whole morass coming out of this.
Here are some of the many other geneticists who don't think meaningful conclusions can be drawn from such studies, fearing what the general public would make out of such information:
No conclusions can be drawn from n=1, a prioriMT @mims: Geneticists to study the DNA of Adam Lanza nytimes.com/2012/12/25/sci…#protectresearch
— Ashley Ng (@drng) December 25, 2012
@dgmacarthur @edyong209 This is essentially celebrity genomics. Scientifically useless but amusing in some cases. Not amusing in this one.
— Joe Pickrell (@joe_pickrell) December 26, 2012
@joe_pickrell @dgmacarthur @edyong209 I agree, but while nobody cares about Ozzy's genome, what will people with this one? Test their kids?
— Nicolas Robine (@notSoJunkDNA) December 26, 2012
Many journalists who cover genetic research for a living also remain skeptical:
Groan. Sequencing Adam Lanza's DNA will tell us what? Will prevent what? Seriously? nyti.ms/Tob8GD
— Amy Maxmen (@amymaxmen) December 26, 2012
Crazy-misguided: Geneticists are going to study the DNA of Adam Lanza to look for clues about what was wrong with him. nytimes.com/2012/12/25/sci…
— Christopher Mims (@mims) December 25, 2012
Genomic analysis of Adam Lanza planned - the type of project that makes you question someone's grasp of genetics nytimes.com/2012/12/25/sci…
— Ed Yong(@edyong209) December 25, 2012

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Apple online customer satisfaction drops to lowest point in four years

In a survey of more than 24,000 customers, Apple’s (AAPL) online customer satisfaction during the Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping seasons was found to be at its lowest in the past four years according to Forsee, an industry analyst firm. Apple slipped out of the top five for highest online customer satisfaction during the holiday shopping season, falling to a score of 80/100 – a drop of three points from 2011. Meanwhile, Amazon (AMZN) maintained its spot at the top with a score of 88/100. Forsee’s survey based the scores on “appeal of merchandise, website functionality, and the quality of website content.” The survey’s full findings are available below.

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Record-breaking 17.4 million Android and iOS devices activated on Christmas Day; tablets top smartphones

More Android and iOS devices were activated on Christmas Day this year than on any other day. According to analytics firm Flurry, 17.4 million Android and iOS devices were activated during the holiday, an increase of 332% compared to an average of 4 million activations per day. This year’s numbers were found to be more than two and a half times larger than Christmas Day last year, which saw 6.8 million devices activated. Once their smartphones and tablets were turned on, consumers collectively downloaded 328 million applications.
[More from BGR: Google names 12 best Android apps of 2012]
[More from BGR: Samsung looks to address its biggest weakness in 2013]
Interestingly, Flurry found that for the first time ever, more tablets (51% of all activations) were activated on Christmas than smartphones (49% of all activations). The big winners were said to be Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and iPad mini, and Amazon’s (AMZN) 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet.
The firm notes that “Amazon had a very strong performance in the tablet category, growing by several thousand percent over its baseline of tablet activations over the earlier part of December.

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iOS apps see Christmas sales spike shrink in 2012

Distimo just released its statistics on Christmas Day app downloads and revenue growth… and the download spike is far smaller than it was last year. Back in 2011, Christmas Day iOS app download volume spiked 230% above the December average. This year, the increase was just 87% — far below industry expectations. The revenue spike came in at 70%.
[More from BGR: Google names 12 best Android apps of 2012]
Interestingly, iPad downloads increased by 140% this Christmas, implying that the iPhone download bounce was really modest.
[More from BGR: New purported BlackBerry Z10 specs emerge: 1.5GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 8MP camera]
A few weeks ago, AppAnnie released statistics showing that iOS app revenue growth had stalled over the summer of 2012, whereas Android app revenue growth was relatively strong at 48% over a five month period. Both Distimo and Appannie are respected companies and their analytics are closely followed by app industry professionals. Could it be that the pace of iPhone app revenue growth has slowed down sharply from 2011 levels, even if Distimo and AppAnnie numbers aren’t entirely accurate?

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