HYDERABAD: Two persons, which includes a Nigerian national, were arrested by cybercrime sleuths of Rachakonda police for allegedly conning many persons in the pretext of providing jobs, matrimonial alliances and others. The accused, Fidelis Obinna, a Nigerian national and his accomplice Anil Kumar Pandey were arrested from Delhi and police seized 4 mobile phones, 13 cheque books of different bank accounts, 65 debit or ATM cards, 19 swiping machines, Republic of Nigeria passport, Rs 30,000 cash from them besides freezing Rs 6.27 lakh cash in bank accounts. Obinna first came to India on a visiting visa. Later, from his Nigerian friends in India, he learnt conning people by befriending victims through social media. Obinna befriended Anil Kumar to use latter’s banking accounts to withdraw the ill-gotten money earned by cheating victims. The accused, to deceive the victims, used to create fake social media accounts using photographs of Europeans. He duped several victims by assuring them to provide jobs or cheat the victims by promising to marry after collecting money, offering gifts and others. The accused was arrested based on the bank account and phone number details. The accused used to destroy the phone and SIM cards used by them during the commission of an offence.
WARANGAL: A Covid-19 patient committed suicide by jumping off the second floor of the government-run MGM Hospital in the wee hours of Friday. According to hospital authorities, the patient, identified as Rayapuram Lingamurthy of Sangem mandal in Warangal Rural district, was admitted as in -patient on July 24 with Covid symptoms. He was recovering from the virus. Unfortunately, on Thursday midnight he called duty doctors and complained of severe stomachache. Junior doctors attended him and asked his wife Devi to monitor his condition. At 2.30 am he stated that his pain subsided. However, at about 3 am, Lingamurthy jumped from the second floor. The incident was noticed by the attendants of patients. Hospital staff rushed to the spot but Lingamurthy succumbed to the injuries. The body was shifted for postmortem. Mattewada police has registered the case and body handed over to the family.
Val Lewton was a producer who, in a sense, made a bargain unheard of in the history of Hollywood ego, trading prestige for freedom. He took a job as head of the horror department at RKO, and was given only three restrictions: The movies had to be cheap, relatively short, and the studio would provide titles (so, for example, we have a revisionist take on Jane Eyre and scathing critique of colonialism titled…I Walked with a Zombie). Other than that, he had free rein. The apex of this period was 1942’s Cat People, a stylish psychosexual noir directed by Jacques Tourneur that was much more about repressed trauma and existential dread than monsters…but there were enough horror movie trappings to make it a hit.
The 1944 follow-up is a direct sequel, focusing on two of the original’s main characters and their daughter, but in tone, it’s wildly divergent. A ghost story of sorts, the young girl is haunted, literally, by her parents’ past, but the threat is more emotional than physical. It’s a wonderful, and wonderfully humane, treatment of deeply damaged characters, all of whom are worthy of empathy (living or dead). Director Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Haunting, etc., etc., etc.) and company also build some stunning set-pieces, making the most of the film’s barely existent budget. I can only imagine the reaction of 1944 audiences who paid to see a horror movie about curses and cat people only to get a dark but big-hearted, fantasy. Surely the greatest trick Val Lewton ever played.
Hey, did your phone just ding? It sounded like a match. Congrats! But oh, what’s this? The match is someone super hot you swiped right on with the assumption they’d never actually swipe right back?
It’s all fun and games when you’re maniacally swiping late at night, approving every cool-looking person who appears on the screen, but it gets more serious when you remember they’re real people who can—and just might—like you back. It’s a blessing and a curse to go out with someone who is drop-dead gorgeous or has an ultra-cool job. On the one hand, it’s a dream come true…but on the other, it can be a mortifying reminder of your own insecurities. Here’s how to get ready for a date with someone you think is out of your league.
Know how to hype yourself up
The key here is that you need to remember that they swiped right or agreed to go on this date because they saw something worthwhile in you. That alone should have you feeling great, no matter what it is about this other person that is making you so nervous.
“If someone agreed to the date and they’re not ghosting you, they most likely don’t think there’s a ‘league’ issue,” said Hannah May, a 26-year-old Chicagoan who describes herself as a lifestyle blogger and amateur dater.
“Remember that you have a lot to offer,” she said. “You need to focus on yourself and work on yourself before dating, period, or you’re not going to get anything out of it.”
Type out a list of all the cool, wonderful things about you. Ask a few trusted friends to contribute to what we’re sure is an already-lengthy list of your terrific attributes. Read that list. Internalize it. You’re fun! You’re attractive! The out-of-your-leaguer thought so when they agreed to meet up, so ask yourself why you’re experiencing self-doubt.
If the nasty internal monologue is the result of, say, put-downs from an ex, remember that those insults came from a place of hurt or maybe even projection, likely at a rough time as the relationship was disintegrating. Don’t let the negative, warped opinion of someone whose association with you was negative impact the way you see and project yourself going forward. You’re a lot cooler than you think you are, and you deserve to date someone awesome.
Role play from a better perspective
What would you tell a friend in this situation? Imagine that a beloved, lifelong pal came to you and said they were nervous for a date with someone hotter or more established than they are. You’d bug out, right? You’d—gently—tear them to bits for being so hard on themselves.
We all have people who love us, from family members to friends. Think about how hurt your mom or brother would be to hear you negatively comparing yourself to someone else. When you do this, you’re implying your own friends and loved ones have bad taste, you know. And they don’t!
Suggest meeting in neutral ground
If this person is a big-shot in the movie industry, don’t go to a Hollywood hot spot. If they’re a publishing powerhouse, don’t go to the bookstore. If you feel they have a slammin’ body, avoid the beach. Essentially, don’t go somewhere that is going to exacerbate the feelings of inadequacy you’re already experiencing and give them a leg up, even if they don’t realize you’re perceiving them to have the edge on you here. Instead, suggest a date location that is more neutral and doesn’t lend itself as a highlight to whatever you see as the incredible attribute in them that is making you so nervous.
Try to be reasonable
Have you ever seen the cover of a tabloid? If you have—and we know you have—then you know that even the hottest, most accomplished people in the world go through breakups. Ask yourself why that might be. Is it possible that being attractive or talented isn’t the only thing that matters in a relationship?
You already know that looks, awards, accolades, and clout get people far, but in order for anyone to have fulfilling relationships, they have to have substance, too.
Consider this: There is more to the person you’re about to meet up with than their angelic bone structure or high-paying job. Moreover, whatever else there is to them might actually suck. To put it plainly, you might not like them. If they were as perfect as you’re envisioning them to be, would they not already be securely snatched up by some equally-fancy person?
May pointed to advice that her cousin gave her: “Instead of worrying about if they like you, worry about if you like them. This mindset shift also helps with any jitters or anxiety.”
Don’t overcorrect here and go into the date thinking they’re damaged goods or anything, but be reasonable. A hot bod does not a perfect mate make.
Recognize your insecurity without taking it out on the other person
Look, you’re feeling nervous and insecure. That’s fine; it happens to everyone. But don’t take out your feeling of inadequacy on this person, who is probably perfectly nice and normal and likely has no idea you think they occupy some unreachable level of greatness. As we’ve established, they agreed to hang out with you for a reason. They think you’re interesting and attractive. This is almost certainly not a romcom-style joke where they’re going on a pity date with you, but even if it were, that would only be further proof they suck and are not the one for you.
“I’ve wasted so much time in my life overthinking texts and what to say and I feel like those situations never work out,” said May, who advises against worrying so damn much. “If someone’s for you, you won’t have to overthink your interactions or be left feeling confused.”
Don’t go into this defensively or expecting the worst. Give yourself a stern talking-to, go on the date, figure out if you have anything in common, and go from there like you would with anyone else. Whatever hangups you have are totally your own; this person has no idea that you don’t think you’re good-looking or you feel like you’re not advancing in your career. They just want to learn about you, so let them. Allow them and yourself to be surprised.
HYDERABAD: The GHMC and Veterinary and Animal Husbandry department (V&AH) have served notices to 67 pet shops and identified 12 dog breeders in the greater Hyderabad region in the last two weeks. The notices were served to the pet shops and breeders after the principal secretary of MAUD, Arvind Kumar directed the GHMC commissioner Lokesh Kumar to take action against all illegal units and shut them down, if they don’t comply with guidelines of the Telangana State Animal Welfare Board (TSAWB). In his letter, the principal secretary lambasted the GHMC for permitting the illegal breeders to operate saying that the civic body allowed them to operate illegally by bringing them under the ambit of pet shops. However, when asked about the illegal breeders and those breeding dogs at home for commercial purposes, the official said, “In GHMC limits there are only 12 breeders. More than 90% of the dog breeders are outside GHMC limits. If people are breeding dogs at home, we cannot designate them as breeders. For breeding there should be kennels, space and there are other rules which need to be followed and that activity will not be tolerated in residential areas. To avoid these, GHMC’s instructions are to get the dogs sterilized.” However, officials informed that while the GHMC can issue notices, as per the Pet Shop Rules, 2018 and Dog Breeding and Marketing Rules, 2017 rules, only the state animal welfare board has the authority to shut down or take any other action against illegal pet shops or breeding units. Meanwhile, Dr Monika, assistant veterinary director, state animal husbandry department said, “We have received applications for registration from 77 pet shops in the city so far and prior to that 67 of them were served notices. Registration applications will be sent to the concerned district official to conduct inspections and give the inspection proforma to V&AH. Only if the inspection report is satisfactory, we issue the inspection certificate. So far, one or two inspections of pet shops have been taken up.” GHMC has been directed to slap notices against the dog breeders, asking them to apply for registration. Failure to obtain registration by August 15 would mean closure.
Boxing experience Thrill of the Fight is the toughest game I played, it got my heart rate the highest, and even though the graphics were a bit cheesy I ended up totally immersed. Between rounds of one fight, I nearly sat down on the virtual stool in my corner of the ring.
The hands-on experience begins when you start the app and see the menus explaining how the game works. Instead of pointing your controllers at buttons on the menus (most games have you aim them like laser guns), you walk directly up to the menu screens and touch them with your virtual hands, which are already wearing boxing gloves.
You’re in a small gym with a garage-like feel. A coach stands off to the side, watching you but not speaking. There’s a locker room area, a dummy you can practice punches on, and an elevated boxing ring. Choose an opponent to fight, and suddenly you’re in one corner of the ring with a small crowd gathered around. You throw punches, and try not to get punched. If you do take a hit, the world fades a bit, goes black and white, and you (if you are like me) back away from your opponent for a minute while you try to get your bearings.
I won three rounds against my opponent, but it was exhausting. I hit him when I could, and kept moving toward him, trying to keep the pressure on. I found myself constantly pushing into the far corner of my Guardian, which the game helpfully draws as a red rectangle on the virtual ring’s floor. I needed to punch and punch again and not get punched myself. The audience was watching, my coach judging silently. I didn’t want to fuck this up. I didn’t want to get punched. If you want to get your heart rate up, or just be a little bit terrified for a short interval workout, play Thrill of the Fight.
bid to revolutionize IPOs has created losses for investors instead, after one of the year’s most highly anticipated listings fell flat.
In a regulatory filing in early July, the trading platform’s co-founders said they would open their initial public offering to customers on equal terms with institutional investors. They said they recognized it may be the first IPO many would participate in, and pledged to “never sacrifice the safety of our customers’ money.”
It now appears Robinhood’s commitment to “democratizing” the IPO process played a role in the offering’s big initial stumble Thursday. An innovative auction system sowed some confusion among investors, many already suspicious of the valuation of a business that has drawn scrutiny from regulators and criticism from customers, people involved in the process said.
The stock, initially priced at $38, the bottom of the target range, sits below that. It is a disappointing result at a time when IPOs are booming and investor appetite for new issues is robust.
Robinhood proudly tore up the traditional IPO playbook. It insisted a large chunk of its stock—in the end up to 25%—go to its individual-investor customers compared with the normal retail allocation of well under 10%. It said employees could sell a portion of their stock right away instead of being locked up for six months. And when it came to determining the price of its IPO, Robinhood decided to use a hybrid-auction process, which attempts to assign shares to investors based on what they are willing to pay, regardless of who they are.
Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, in gray suit, and CEO and co-founder Vladimir Tenev in the Wall Street area of New York City on Thursday.
The hybrid auction has worked in other IPOs in the past year. In typical listings, underwriters give their investor clients updates throughout the roadshow—the seven- to 10-day period in which a company pitches its stock. These updates typically include guidance on how much demand bankers are seeing for the shares and the rough price they ultimately expect to set.
& Co. gave few such updates, people familiar with the matter said. When some large investors called the other underwriters on the deal, some of those bankers pleaded ignorance.
The opaqueness of the process sowed suspicion among some investors who assumed the deal was going poorly and adjusted their orders accordingly, investors and bankers said.
Many had already expressed concern about how much of Robinhood’s revenue comes from a controversial practice called payment-for-order-flow, which the Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing, people who attended the roadshow said. Others questioned what they saw as the high valuation the eight-year-old company was seeking—in excess of $30 billion.
Another concern: whether Robinhood’s controversial decision earlier this year to stop users from buying meme stocks like
Wednesday night, as bankers met with Robinhood Chief Executive
Vlad Tenev
to set the price, some investors said they were only told it would be within the $38 to $42 target range. This surprised many large institutions, who are used to more guidance heading into a pricing meeting.
A Robinhood IPO event in Times Square.
An unusually large percentage of shares were set to be allocated to hedge funds, which are more likely to “flip” IPO stock on the first day of trading, according to people close to the deal. To bring in more of the biggest institutional funds who are viewed as “buy-and-hold” investors, Robinhood chose $38 a share instead of the higher price some funds were willing to pay.
The company and Goldman felt comfortable that the lower price was conservative enough that the shares would rise on their first day of trading, especially given the buzz around Robinhood in the lead-up to the listing, according to people close to the deal.
Instead, the stock opened at $38 a share, unusual at a time when big initial pops for hot IPOs are more the norm. It rose higher briefly, touching $40 before dropping through the IPO price. It closed down 8.4% Thursday.
The shares fell further still Friday morning before regaining some ground in the early afternoon.
The brokerage app Robinhood has transformed retail trading. WSJ explains its rise amid a series of legal investigations and regulatory challenges. Photo illustration: Jacob Reynolds/WSJ
In rare cases, such pitches have paid off big time. More often, you’d have done yourself a favor by taking roughly half your money and lighting it on fire instead.
On June 23, 1971, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. became the first New York Stock Exchange firm catering to individual investors to offer its shares to the public.
Thirsty for fresh capital in a struggling stock market, Merrill flogged its shares to its own customers, tapping the firm’s “awesome recognition among that vast segment of the population,” reported The Wall Street Journal the next day. “Primarily small investors, the type long championed by Merrill Lynch, quickly purchased the entire amount.”
Nearly 400 insiders at the firm unloaded a total of 2 million shares in the offering. From its initial $28 per share, the stock shot to about $42—a 50% pop—then closed around $39. That valued Merrill at 30.5 times its prior-year earnings, much higher than the overall stock market’s price/earnings ratio of 18.7.
Less than three weeks later, Merrill announced that its net earnings had fallen nearly 50% from the prior quarter.
For the rest of 1971, Merrill’s stock lost 9.4%; the S&P 500 gained 4%, counting dividends.
In 1972, when the S&P 500 rose nearly 19%, Merrill sank 7.7%. And in 1973-74, when the S&P 500 lost 37%, Merrill’s stock slumped by 61%. In its first three full years, Merrill’s stock lost three-quarters of its value; the S&P 500 fell only 5%.
Here in 2021, Robinhood’s offering is one of several trading and investing IPOs:
One of Wall Street’s oldest and frankest sayings is “When the ducks quack, feed ‘em”—meaning that whenever investors are eager to buy something, brokers will sell it like mad.
Back in 1971, that was the brokers’ own shares. Roughly half a dozen major firms sold stock to the public soon after Merrill, including Bache & Co. and Dean Witter & Co. By 1974, according to data from the Center for Research in Security Prices LLC, several of them had dealt losses at least as devastating as Merrill’s.
In 1987, Jane and Joe Investor got invited to join in on the fun of Charles Schwab Corp.’s IPO, when roughly three million of the offering’s eight million shares were reserved for employees and customers of the firm.
bought the firm, Schwab went on to generate spectacular long-term performance. Over the full sweep of time since its 1987 IPO, Schwab is up more than 26,500%, or 17.9% annualized. The S&P 500 gained less than 3,500%, or an average of 11.3% annually.
However, Schwab went public in late September 1987. Only 18 trading days later, on Oct. 19, the U.S. stock market took its biggest one-day fall in history, plunging more than 20%.
Schwab’s stock got brutalized. In their first year, Schwab’s shares fell 59.1%. After three years, the market as a whole had gained 0.6% annually; Schwab’s stock lost an annualized average of 6.9%, according to CRSP.
How many of the original buyers in 1987 stuck around long enough to reap the giant rewards that came much later? That’s impossible to know, but the likeliest answer has to be: very few.
Every once in a while, outside investors in a brokerage IPO do well.
began trading on May 4, 1999. If you’d bought Goldman stock in the IPO and held it ever since, you’d have earned 9.1% a year, versus 7.6% in the S&P 500, according to FactSet.
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Jason Zweig writes about investment strategy and how to think about money.
Yet Goldman was a giant then, as it is now; it was late to the IPO party because it had held on to its partnership structure for so many years. Most brokerage IPOs, like Robinhood’s, occur when the firms are younger and smaller.
That makes them typical. Companies selling shares to the public for the first time tend to be small, with minimal profits; they also require additional invested capital to sustain their rapid growth.
That’s what Savina Rizova, global head of research at Dimensional Fund Advisors, an asset manager in Austin, Texas, calls “a toxic combination of characteristics that points to low expected returns.”
The brokerage app Robinhood has transformed retail trading. WSJ explains its rise amid a series of legal investigations and regulatory challenges. Photo illustration: Jacob Reynolds/WSJ
HYDERABAD: Now, customer can choose a Rakhi through e-Shop from the available varieties, specially designed envelope along with preprinted/personalized message to their beloved ones in the website. India Post will deliver the Rakhis to all destinations across India through Speed Post. On Friday, S Rajendra Kumar, chief postmaster general, Telangana Circle has launched sale of Rakhi through e-Shop in Telangana Postal website www.eshop.tsposts.in at Dak Sadan, in Hyderabad. Speaking on the occasion, chief PMG Rajendra Kumar said, “Raksha Bandhan is a festival that invites all the hassles that promise to protect their sisters to get an imprint of love which is decorated in a variety of ways to make the festival even more special.” Telangana Postal Circle has launched a facility and convenience to brother and sisters who are residing far away by facilitating Rakhi through e-Shop in across the country, he said. For this, customer has to pay Rs 100 through online with one click one entry in e-Shop portal of Telangana Circle (www.eshop.tsposts.in) and utilise the facility, said Rajendra Kumar.
MULUGU: Eturnagaram police arrested two inter-state tiger skin smugglers on Thursday. According to superintendent of police, Sangramsingh G Patil, two persons came to Mullakatta bridge in Eturnagaram to sell illegally obtained adult tiger skin. Acting on reliable information, Eturnagaram Circle inspector K Kiran Kumar and staff nabbed the culprits. During interrogation, they confessed the crime and showed their identity as Thirumalesh, a resident of Wazedu in Mulugu district and Satyam of Chandur in Chhattisgarh. Police seized the skin, a phone and motorcycle from them.
