ICICI Bank, the biggest private lender of India, is open to buying loan portfolios of European banks, its chief executive said.

“The opportunity to pick up some good assets at good pricing clearly exists. So, that’s what we are looking at all the time and exercising it whenever we see the right opportunity,” Chanda Kochhar told the Reuters India Investment Summit on Wednesday.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

European banks are struggling to raise their capital cushions to become more resilient against future shocks, which they can do by increasing equity they hold or by shrinking their asset base.

The European Banking Authority has said banks need more than 100 billion euros of new capital, but the International Monetary Fund warned in September EU banks faced possible losses of 300 billion euros as a result of sovereign and interbank lending risks.

Kochhar, who was ranked fifth in Fortune’s 50 most powerful women in business, ruled out the acquisition of any European bank.

“We have picked up some which are India-related assets, but I would say not very large number, because given the fact that on the other hand the ability to raise funds currently has also become more expensive,” she said.

Online shoppers did not wait around till Cyber Monday to start their holiday shopping.

U.S. consumers spent 20 percent more online on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, this year than last, while online sales jumped 39 percent on Thanksgiving Day, according to IBM Corp. research unit Coremetrics.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

Coremetrics measures sales data from more than 500 online retailers, including half of the top 50. It doesn’t reveal its partners or specific dollar figures.

Both Coremetrics and e-commerce payment site PayPal, a united of eBay Inc., said shopping by mobile phone is increasingly substantially this year. PayPal said it saw five times more mobile payments worldwide this Thanksgiving, compared with last year.

And Coremetrics said about 17 percent of Black Friday visitors to retail websites came via mobile devices, up from about 5 percent a year ago.

“People keep spending money online, so that’s a great indicator that the sites are running,” John Squire, an executive with IBM’s e-commerce marketing unit, said.

The software services companies of India are set to report strong revenue growth when they kick off their quarterly earnings next week but orders may get crimped down by a slowing U.S. economy and the debt crisis in Europe.

A weak rupee may help boost margins of market leaders Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, with the sluggish global economy poses a risk to pricing and new orders.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

Most of the clients of the companies, which manage computer networks and maintain IT operations for several Fortune 500 firms, usually set their annual budget for the next year by November.

Infosys, India’s No.2 software-services firm, will kick off earnings on Wednesday and some analysts expect the company will cut its 2011/12 dollar revenue growth target as demand tapers.

In April-June, the company’s new client additions were the lowest in at least four years and it had warned in July that it faced a volatile global economy that could slow client spending.

“We expect the results to be decent, but the focus will be on their guidance to get a sense of whether clients are postponing spends or expecting price cuts,” said Mohit Mirchandani, head of equity at Religare Portfolio Management, which holds IT stocks in its portfolio of around $250 million.

Stocks plunged on Thursday to extend a selloff to four days as the failure of policymakers to arrest global economic stagnation sent markets spiraling downward.

The heavy volume of the day’s plunge suggested that investors are selling in anticipation of more losses. The CBOE volatility index, considered as the “fear gauge” of the Wall Street, jumped 12 percent as investors protected against more losses to come.

From Reuters.com:

Weak data from China followed an unsettling outlook about the U.S. economy from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday in stoking recession fears. The previous session’s losses were sparked after the Fed said it saw “significant downside risks” facing the economy.

China’s once-booming manufacturing sector contracted for a third consecutive month, while the euro zone’s dominant service sector shrank in September for the first time in two years.

Those searching for positive market signs could point to the benchmark S&P 500 index holding above 1,120, seen as a key technical support level which could trigger more selling if broken.

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 391.01 points, or 3.51 percent, to 10,733.83. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lost 37.20 points, or 3.19 percent, to 1,129.56. The Nasdaq Composite Index slid 82.52 points, or 3.25 percent, to 2,455.67.

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Porn websites were among the big winners after Google made a change to its page ranking algorithm.

This finding was revealed by German Analytics Company Searchmetrics.com, compiling lists of the top 100 losers and top 100 winners of the change in Google’s algorithm.

From Newswire.xbiz.com:

KeezMovies.com,YouJizz.com, PerfectGirls.net and SitesLike.com were among the porn winners with the update, known as Panda. Even file sharing site FilesTube.com was in the top 100.

Panda lowers the ranking of sites with aggressive advertising and recycled content.

Searchmetrics says that it has performed an analysis of 8 million different keywords in the U.K. in the past 10 months that shows the impact of the recent update.

The list of losers and winners was calculated using its Organic Performance Index on a week-on-week basis, according to a keyword’s search volume, position and statistical value of the traffic distribution.

These sites may have won a favor with Google but many big names including Microsoft-owned comparison site Ciao have brought anti-trust complaints against Google.