Reliance’s eight perfect minutes

Akshara· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about an eight-minute fraud, and then we'll talk about whether the ATMs in India are dead. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Wednesday, 3rd June. Coming to the first story. So it was a late November afternoon back in 2007. Eight minutes were left on the clock. It was the last day the November futures on Reliance Petroleum would trade. Everything now depended on how much the shares sold for during the day's last half-hour. Once the market shut, those futures contracts would all cash out at the average price for the period. Three-fourths of Reliance Petroleum was owned by its storied parent company, Reliance Industries. But that afternoon, the parent had taken a large bet against its share price. Using 12 different entities as a front, it has built up massive short positions in the company, and all of these would pay off if Reliance Petroleum's shares fell. The bigger the fall, the more they would profit. And then Reliance Industries seemed to cause the very fall it would profit from. Over those last eight minutes of trading, it sold 1.95 crore Reliance Petroleum shares into the market, and prices tanked. The share's average price for that closing half-hour crashed. All the futures