Even in turbulent times some equity fund managers have shown better short-term performance and have beaten the benchmark indices through clever stock picking and aggressive cash calls.
Large-cap and multi-equity cap funds such as Birla Sun Life GenNext (-10.5%), BNP Paribas Equity (-14.5%), ICICI Prudential Dynamic(-16.4%), Franklin India Bluechip (-16.5%) and DSP BlackRock Focus 25 (-17.7%) gave higher returns?albeit negative?than that of Sensex since November last year, as per data provided by Value Research, a mutual fund tracker.
Since November 4 last year, Sensex gave a negative return of over 22.74% while it was 22.86% for Nifty. Top fund managers have given negative return in the range of 10-20%. Sankaran Naren, CIO-Equities at ICICI Prudential MF says, ?Our Dynamic fund was sitting on cash of over 35% in last October as market valuations touched new high. But as markets corrected we slowly started investing?. He added that currently the fund is lesser on cash with cash-level near 8-10% of overall portfolio.
Mahesh Patil, CO-CIO at Birla Sun Life MF says, ?Gen-next is our thematic fund and primarily invest in consumption sectors like FMCG and Pharma.? Incidentally, these sectors have been outperformers and have done well in turbulent times. He added that good stock selection and sticking to sectors which are not impacted by high interest rates also helped in outperforming the benchmark index.
While some funds outperformed, other equity schemes such as JM Equity, Templeton India Growth, Birla Sun Life Advantage, Reliance Equity and L&T Equity underperformed the market. While ten months is too short to gauge performance of a fund manager, it seems some fund managers have been able to do relatively well by timing the markets and through active portfolio management.