The Omicron coronavirus variant kicked oil prices lower late last week and has sapped refining margins, but with crude futures rallying on Monday, the impact could be limited. Governments worldwide have imposed curbs on travellers to try limit the spread of Omicron, first detected in southern Africa, as scientists race to determine the level of risk. Oil prices plunged more than 10% on Friday - their largest daily drop since April 2020 - but recovered some of those losses on Monday, standing up nearly 5% on the day. Analysts said the Friday sell-off had been excessive. , Refining margins fell…

For more than 35 years, psychology professor Robert Cialdini has been studying the science of persuasion to figure out what makes people say “yes.” He put much of what he’s learned in his 1984 best-seller, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” Now, newly revised, Cialdini has added some more recent persuasion tricks to the book. One of those is creating a “we group” mentality. The key to creating a “we group” is to make the person you want to influence feel the two of you are part of the same group, says Cialdini. “People are inclined to say yes to someone…

Salespeople have used psychological principles to increase their sales, as well as customer satisfaction, for decades. Yet when it comes to entrepreneurs who want to build their businesses, they're far more likely to pick up a book on product development or marketing than they are on psychology. But why aren't more entrepreneurs including psychology in their research when it could significantly help their business? One serial entrepreneur, Ryan Hornby (founder of a technology start-up, based in Belfast, Northern Ireland), is working to change this. He's studied psychology extensively as he's grown his businesses, which include IAM, a model and creative…

The naira weakened further against the dollar at the parallel market on Wednesday to trade at N560 per dollar. The figure is N15 or 2.8 percent lower than the N545 it traded last week. Street traders across forex markets in Lagos who spoke to our correspondent on Wednesday quoted the naira at N560 to a dollar. They said that the naira has continued to fall rapidly against the greenback over the past week. A parallel market (street market) is characterised by non-compliant behaviour with an institutional set of rules. Meanwhile, the currency which opened trading at an indicative price of…