Good morning. Mumbai woke up to a third straight day of red alerts, with parts of the city still cut off after the weekend's rain turned deadly. Markets had a far better week, closing higher for a fourth session in a row even as the rupee slipped. Here is what is worth your time today.
In today's newsletter: Dalal Street's busiest SME IPO day of the year, a chawl collapse that exposed Mumbai's monsoon fault lines, and what India is really after in Modi's Jakarta visit.
Closing levels · July 6, 2026
Sensex 78,285.07 UP 0.67% |
Nifty 50 24,430.35 UP 0.66% |
USD/INR 95.38 RUPEE DOWN 20p |
Brent Crude $71.57 DOWN 0.76% |
Realty, auto and oil and gas stocks led the fourth straight day of gains, even as the rupee gave up ground against the dollar and oil stayed soft.
Six SME IPOs hit Dalal Street in the year's busiest single-day listing rush
On Tuesday, six small and medium enterprise companies made their market debut together, in what was the highest number of single-day SME listings anywhere in 2026 so far. Kratikal Tech, Vinit Mobile, Sampark India Logistics, Seemax Resources, Atharva Polyplast and Teja Engineering Industries together raised roughly ₹185 crore, split across the BSE and NSE Emerge SME platforms.
The debuts were anything but uniform. Kratikal Tech walked in with a grey market premium above 50 percent, while the other five were trading flat to muted in the unofficial market ahead of listing, a reminder that retail appetite for new paper has become far more selective than the blanket SME-IPO euphoria of the past couple of years.
SME listings have kept coming thick and fast through 2026 even as mainboard sentiment has cooled, with IT majors down sharply from their peaks and Q1 earnings season about to test that mood further. Small-ticket IPOs are proving to be the one corner of the market still running hot, largely insulated from the bigger anxieties about AI-linked disruption and global demand weighing on large-cap tech.
The split grey-market reception, one runaway winner and five shrugs, is arguably more telling than the record listing count itself. It suggests retail money is now pricing individual businesses rather than chasing the SME label wholesale, a sign the segment may be maturing rather than simply frothing.
A chawl collapse in Mankhurd exposes Mumbai's monsoon fault lines
On Sunday night, a three-storey chawl in Mankhurd's Mandala locality caved in during torrential rain, and killed six people, five of them children. Mumbai's eastern suburbs had recorded over 200mm of rain in the preceding 24 hours, with Vikhroli West seeing more than 310mm.
The city has stayed under a red alert into a third day, with schools shut, Mumbai-Pune train services suspended and landslides reported across the hill sections connecting the city to the Deccan plateau. The chawl collapse is the sharpest reminder yet of how thin the margin is between heavy rain and tragedy in a city where old, dense housing sits directly in the path of the monsoon's worst.
What India is really after in Modi's Jakarta visit: missiles and minerals
PM Modi landed in Jakarta on Monday for the first leg of a six-day Indo-Pacific tour, and the two governments used the visit to push forward on Indonesia's interest in buying more BrahMos missiles, while Delhi pushes for access to Indonesian critical minerals. Indonesia holds the world's largest nickel reserves, a resource India has almost none of and badly needs for its electric mobility push.
Beyond defence and minerals, the two sides are working through a batch of MoUs spanning healthcare, pharmaceuticals, education and space cooperation. The subtext running through all of it is China: both countries are looking to cut their dependence on Chinese-controlled mineral processing and defence supply chains.
Breaking.exe
Chip supply lock-in. Apple and Broadcom extended their custom chip partnership through 2031, locking in Apple's radio and wireless chip supply for years; Broadcom shares jumped 5 percent on a deal that covers roughly a fifth of its annual revenue. |
Chemicals bet on AI. Honeywell spinoff Solstice Advanced Materials is in talks to merge with Element Solutions in a deal valued near $27 billion, a wager on demand for the specialty chemicals used in AI data centres and chipmaking. |
Earnings season opens. India's IT sector heads into Q1 FY27 results with TCS reporting on July 9, a keenly watched test for a sector still down sharply from its highs on AI-disruption fears. |
Firewalls breached. Hackers believed to be linked to Russia broke into systems tied to the UK Foreign Office and local councils by exploiting stolen credentials and Fortinet firewall weaknesses, compromising roughly 80,000 devices. |
Pangaea Revisited
NATO's Turkey summit. Trump arrived in Turkey for a NATO summit carrying fresh complaints about Europe, even as allies scramble to show him they are meeting his demands. |
Israel heads to the polls. The Knesset is now expected to dissolve on July 17, setting up national elections as late as October 27 amid coalition tensions over the military draft law. |
Tanzania cracks down. Authorities arrested dozens of people ahead of nationwide Saba Saba Day protests, defying its own ban on political rallies. |
A show of force near Taiwan. China and Russia began a joint naval exercise in the Yellow Sea, widely read as a signal to Japan and the US over the wider Indo-Pacific. |
Also, Also, Also
Sunny Deol's OTT debut. Sunny Deol will make his first major streaming appearance in the legal thriller Ikka, reuniting with Akshaye Khanna nearly three decades after Border, premiering on Netflix on July 10. |
A drier month ahead. Even as Mumbai drowns, the IMD's outlook points to below-normal rainfall and above-normal temperatures across large parts of the country this month, raising concerns for farmers and water supplies elsewhere. |