Shobhit Manwar

Simplifying Financial Markets!

@IITkgp @FMS_Delhi Alum
@dgft

[el.cine @EHuanglu]

omg.. if they were real athletes💀

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@thekaipullai Checked the website. It's crazy good. Thanks!

Wish there was a global version of it. I understand that it's gonna be a lot difficult than India (though mapping bharatvarsha is a huge deal indeed) - but will give a wholistic picture of what the world was going through.

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@SagarAwatade @oracura love your products bro! Cheers.

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@noahkagan ATB! :)

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@thekaipullai omg!

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

This is actually an expected opinion from a hard core economist!

I work in Financial Markets - love the history of money, the concept of it, how retail and instituitions interact with it etc.

Have tried to understand Elon's AI Theory of abundance from multiple POVs - still cant wrap my head around it, phew.

AI is new to the world economy, and we, the retail side have only seen the soft side of it (tokens etc). When the hard side (home robots etc) goes mainstream - a direct comparison to instituitional industrialization definitely seems a little out of place.

Lets see how easy & cheap intelligence pans out into the hardware fronts! :)

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@PawanKChandana @SkyrootA @bharathdaka Crazy work dada! Cheers.

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@Malay4Product International olympics are crazy difficult. I guess it's the first time that India has bagged five golds 100%. That's huge!

Kudos 👏

[Neelkanth Mishra @neelkanthmishra]

How rich should Indians be for India to be called developed?
We can potentially achieve high-income status by the late 2040s, but this requires sustained annual per capital GDP growth of at least 9%. This will be hard to achieve without higher female workforce participation, faster capital formation through improved credit access, and prioritizing productivity gains via significant investment in indigenous technology. Fostering a high-trust society and increasing risk appetite are crucial for this ambitious goal. My article in ToI today https://t.co/bndZZ2545w

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@thekaipullai Awesome!

[Madhav Chanchani @madhavchanchani]

It has been more than a decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp and Instagram.

Yet the contrast in shareholder value created by the two businesses could not be starker.

A quick Gemini search suggests Instagram is worth more than $500 billion.

But WhatsApp is valued at just around $100 billion as part of Meta’s sum-of-the-parts valuation estimate.

This is despite Meta paying nearly 19 times more for WhatsApp than it did for Instagram.

So it's no surprise that Meta is willing to spend over $1 billion to bring Kunal Shah on board to help unlock WhatsApp's potential.

Especially when viewed in the context of Mark Zuckerberg spending tens of billions of dollars hiring AI researchers, the odds of this investment paying off appear significantly higher.

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@opinion Well you should see the India numbers with over 3 unicorns. Wud be north of 80%!

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@FT Is this Financial news? Phew

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump has a meltdown and ends the interview

Welker: Just to be very clear, there's no evidence of what you're saying.

Trump: There’s a lot of evidence. There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. The election was rigged. And it’s happening again in California. They’re cheating.

Welker: Do you have evidence?

Trump: All I have to do is look.

Welker: That’s not evidence. The local officials acknowledge they are slow

Trump: They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked. You’re either crooked or stupid.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The car that used to be in my garage is currently in an Earth-Mars elliptical orbit and will be there for at least 10 million years

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@lexfridman @grok plz summarize.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

Whoaa! Indian Startups like Pronto already doing that for inhouse home services. And one can find 15 year old kids and factory workers doing that, in India.

I wonder if the main idea is just hardware training (I guess hands are the most difficult to figure out?), outsourcing to developing countries is a better bet wrt costs.

Anyhow, all the very best!

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

@WilliamShatner Denny Crane ♥️

[Shobhit Manwar @FinMarketsGuy]

Quite Insightful wrt how AI affects Indian economy!

#INR

[pH @pHequals7]

https://t.co/noKIgZK9aG