Where to look for new opportunities in this expensive market?

“Narratives have a peculiar way of building up. In markets, they are centered around growth. When growth is there, narratives push up all the favorable positive factors to the surface in a virtuous cycle while burying the problems to the bottom. On the other end, when growth is a challenge, they do the opposite by magnifying the challenges by pushing down the positives to the bottom. This is how magnification and distortion happen in markets. It throws up a big investment opportunity when lack of growth is not due to any structural challenge and when the underlying problems are more of cyclical in nature.”

One sector that had to bear the brunt from this distortion, not very long back, was the asset management companies in the mutual funds space. Back then, markets in their myopic wisdom, chose to focus on the ongoing cyclical challenges like regulatory overhang on TER (total expense ratio), temporary pressure on yields from NFOs, perceived threat of passives etc. instead of focusing on the large opportunities that the financialization theme threw up structurally. The derating the sector went through back then, gave a lifetime opportunity to build high conviction positions in a sector that has such a long runway of growth from India’s financialization potential. To understand the potential, all that one needed to do was to look at the salience of in the household financial savings in India and compare with peers in Asia. In India, less than 10% of household financial savings flow into equity while that number is over 20% for Asian peers. Of course, in developed markets like the US, it is well over 40%.

At that time, all that mattered for the markets was the lackluster numbers that were looming for a few quarters in the short term. This resulted in valuation in this sector being pushed down to far below their historical trading multiples. In some extreme cases, where company specific challenges added fire to the fury of sector headwinds, the derating turned deadly to provide a one-foot hurdle kind of deep value opportunities (which one can just step over) in few select cases where one could get a substantial discount (margin of safety) from the underlying FCF based discounted intrinsic value.

As expected, when the regulatory overhang cleared and the growth returned, market narrative shifted to the structural positives from growing penetration from financialization. This shift led to a rerating in valuation for the sector as a whole in the last two quarters. Of course, the rerating was the highest in the companies where there were no company specific challenges. In the rest of the cases where the companies had to deal with both sector and company specific headwinds, hangover effect from distorted price action is persisting to provide entry opportunities in them for those who missed out from the first leg of sector rerating. As growth has returned to even those companies that had company specific challenges (laggards so far) as a result of leadership changes and performance catch-up in schemes (growth well over 30%), it is a question of time before they join the race for rerating. While the sharp discount in valuation in the case of UTI after adjustments of the near Rs. 4000Cr cash in the book (in a market cap of Rs. 12300 Cr+) can trigger a favorable relook, for ABSL (Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC), the market share gains in the SIP segment and its aspiration to target an ambitious double digit share in that segment will drive the rerating. Going by the management commentary, in the case of ABSL, upside to earnings from the expected shift in debt fund flows (in anticipation of rate cuts) to long duration segment, where the yields are higher, will be an added trigger for rerating, given its strong positioning in the debt side.

Market participants had ignored these two opportunities so far because of deep rooted narratives we had highlighted earlier. The additional kicker in the case of UTI could come from the potential sale of stake by PSUs to its largest shareholder (Rowe Price), thereby making it a pure-play private player from its current quasi-public sector status. Both these opportunities are trading at over 50% discount to their peers going by market cap to AUM basis. Given the prospect that the mutual fund industry is looking at doubling its asset size by 2030, investors can look at these discounted opportunities to ride the financialization wave without yielding to the FOMO temptation of rushing into momentum driven themes that are vulnerable to huge downside risks.

While we had taken AMCs as a case study in this piece to highlight the potential opportunities even in this expensive market, the larger point is such opportunities are still available across the sectors like discretionary consumption, dining, auto ancillaries, specialty chemicals, engineering, select FMCG etc. What is interesting is some of these are so deeply discounted that they can qualify for even high weightage and high conviction bets for those who have patient capital.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)