Satish Kumar

The interrelationship between equity, bond, commodity and forex movements can provide investors with abundant trading opportunities regardless of whether one market is trending upward or downward. Hence, to understand the interlinkage between markets, this study examines the long-run and causal linkage between forex, G-sec bonds, oil prices, gold rates, foreign institutional investment (FII) flows, and equity market and sectoral index returns. Daily time-series data from August 2012 to August 2021 were considered for empirical analysis. Johansen’s cointegration test revealed that foreign exchanges like USD, Euro, GBP and Yen, oil and gold rates, G-bond returns and FII flows were significantly cointegrated with the stock market and sectoral indices in the long run. Further, Granger causality found a uni-directional relationship between forex rates (i.e., USD, Euro, Yen) and the market, as well as sectoral indices, except Nifty 50 and Nifty IT indices. Oil price movements were found to effectively predict future price changes of Nifty consumer durables, auto, IT indices. Gold prices are useful to predict Nifty-Auto, Bank, Financial Services, Oil & Gas and PSU. The study also found a bi-directional relationship from FII inflows to the stock market and sectoral indices. The findings suggest that forex rates, oil prices and FII flows significantly affect India’s stock market and sectoral performance. The study contributes to the existing literature by comprehensively examining the interlinkage between commodities such as oil and gold, foreign exchanges like USD, Euro, GBP and Yen, G-bond, FII flows and the stock market, and fourteen sectoral indices in the Indian context.

This research paper examines the relationship selling impact on sales effectiveness in Health Insurance from an agent’s perspective. The study analyzed primary data by personal interaction with respondents in the Karnataka region, India, and used descriptive research with stratified sampling. A sample size of 407 health insurance agents was selected for this study from the age group between 18 to 60 years from diverse backgrounds. The research methodology involves constructing a regression model using the SPSS tool to analyze the data. The findings show that personal interaction determinants have positive and statistically significant effects on sales effectiveness, however, customer dependency and self-discipline have negative and statistically significant impacts on sales effectiveness. The results support the models’ reliability and a good measure of construct validity. Variables like Interaction Intensity (II) and Customer Dependence (CD) (0.632), Personal Interaction (PI) and Customer Dependence (CD) (0.464), and Customer Oriented Selling (COS) and Cooperative Intentions (CI) (0.523) have relatively strong positive correlations, suggesting these pairs move together in the same direction. This implies that an agent’s personal resources can affect their ability to convert relationship-selling behavior to tangible sales results that can guide sales force recruitment and training. Similarly, the organizing and structuring of the sales force can be informed by the findings that customer relationship characteristics influence salespeople’s ability to translate relationship selling behavior into sales effectiveness.