Infosys's Put Option Costs Decline After Indian Rupee Weakens

The cost of options to protect against a drop in Infosys Ltd.’s shares fell for the first time in four days, signaling optimism that a weaker rupee will increase profitability at India’s second-largest software exporter.

One-month puts with a strike price 5 percent below Infosys’s shares cost 1.6 points more than calls priced 5 percent above, according to data available at 3:47 p.m. in Mumbai. The spread, known as skew, was at 2.5 points at Thursday’s close. Infosys shares rose 0.7 percent at the close, while the 50-stock CNX Nifty jumped 1.7 percent.

The skew dropped as the rupee trades near a 20-month low against the U.S. dollar amid outflows from the equity market. The rupee’s recent declines will help software companies grow earnings and orders, and was expected to help stocks rebound, said Rajendra Wadher, a director at PRB Securities.

“Information technology stocks will outperform the Nifty in the near term from a technical perspective,” said Ayush Nagaraj, a sales trader at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “The rupee broke out yesterday and it helps the sector, which is at a support level. The risk-reward at this level is skewed to the upside.”

Shares of Bengaluru-based Infosys are valued at 16.7 times their 12-month projected earnings, compared with a five-year average of 17.3 times. The CNX IT index, which gained 0.4 percent on Friday, trades at a multiple of 15.1.

The rupee strengthened 0.5 percent to 63.9275 per dollar, rebounding from Thursday’s drop to 64.24, its lowest level since September 2013. The India VIX index, a gauge of protection against stock market swings, fell 2.8 percent.

Foreign investors sold local shares for nine days through May 6, paring this year’s net inflows to $6.86 billion, according to data compiled

Athlete dies, three others critical after suicide pact in Kerala

The Kerala police are investigating the death of a 15-year-old female athlete and attempted suicide by three others girls who ate poisonous fruit at a state-run sports institute, a minister said on Thursday.

The teen athletes were reported to have eaten othalanga, a toxic local fruit, in a suicide pact at the centre in Alappuzha in Kerala which is run by the Sports Authority of India (SAI).

They were found unconscious at their hostel late on Wednesday and rushed to hospital where one girl was pronounced dead and the other three remain in a critical condition.

All four were believed to have signed a suicide note, said officials, but no details have been given about the contents of the letter.

Officials said it was too early to speculate on the reason for the suicide pact by the teenagers who were training as rowers but the victims' relatives say the girls were mentally harassed by senior athletes and coaches at the institute.

Minister of State for Youth Affairs and Sports Sarbananda Sonowal said local police were investigating and the SAI director general was heading to the institute as well.

"Law will take its own course, but I assure you that if anybody from Sports Authority of India is found to be guilty in this connection, we will be taking strictest possible action against her or him," Sonowal said in a statement.

SAI Director General Injeti Srinivas told journalists that it was a "very shocking incident".

"Four girls tried to commit suicide. Our entire focus is now on providing them with best possible medical facilities," he said.

Sapphire Now: TreatmentMAP uses SAP Hana to fight cancer

ORLANDO, Fla. – A technology called TreatmentMAP, developed by German biotech company Molecular Health, won the SAP Hana Technology Trailblazer Award at this week’s Sapphire Now event.

TreatmentMAP received the award for using big data to create personalized treatments for cancer patients by combining individual tumor genetics information from patients with the whole of global biomedical knowledge. The award is handed out to the company that is best using big data and the “Internet of Things” to achieve breakthrough results.

The application combines cutting-edge genetic analysis with an enormous and complex data warehouse, which runs on SAP Hana. Pulling from more than 10 years worth of centrally located data from Molecular Health’s data warehouse, certified oncologists then use TreatmentMAP to analyze genome information.

“We constantly comb the latest relevant publications, review them and supplement our data warehouse,” explains Markus Schmitt from Molecular Health. “It now contains more than 23 million publications. Hundreds of cancer indicators, 37,000 drugs, more than 90,000 clinical studies and much more other information are curated here.”

Molecular Health has been using TreatmentMAP to recommend therapies since early 2014. Through its database, TreatmentMAP can generate up to 100 GB of data for each patient and recommend a treatment in just a few hours.

The goal is to create a scale-out model to treat more patients at the same time. SAP expert Kai Sachs said, “Our objective is to run these analyses concurrently for 50, 100, or more patients,”

There is about 700 megabytes of “pure data” generated from each person’s DNA, which creates a problem when trying to treat thousands of patients. In order to achieve necessary throughput, the SAP Hana platform is designed to allow analytics and calculations to be performed directly on the data.