Let us talk about India specifically. Yes, there have been all the positives that have come about from the RBI bazooka, interest rates are controllable. Your EMIs are coming down. Inflation has cooled off, all of that is there. But there is the other part in the market. I was just looking at the data coming in from IPOs that pretty much 40% of them are below their issue price and these blocks that are happening in the market. I mean, one is wondering is that sort of a warning signal at all. How do you read into that?
Samir Arora: So, actually, when some IPO is coming I actually push the idea that it should come at twice that valuation that which it is coming at, which anyway is an obscene valuation and my job is to encourage them to come at an even higher valuation because by staying away from these anyway you add lot of value and we are all being compared to each other. So, some of it is absolutely overdone and good luck to the guys buying it. But let them buy at even higher prices for all we care, this is just joking. But in a serious way, the thing is that it is a chicken and egg, which means the flow does not come, the selling does not come first. The fact that the market has ability to buy comes first and then the private equity guy remembers that he has stock to sell and promoter says he would like to buy a house. So, this is an automatic adjustment. It is not that oh my god, the market has 10-20 billion to sell, how will people get so much money. No, when people have money, then these stocks will come for selling. So, it is a self-correcting mechanism I would say. But in general, if you see the percentage of money that is spent or invested in these IPOs and blocks, it is still not very-very obscene. Yes, market has become very big. It is now like what $5 trillion market.
So, you can have these and still market can move on. But in any case, there is no logic for the market to go up a lot, which means like 20%, 25%. So, we are also expecting it to go up 10%, 12%, 15% over a year and therefore, maybe this is one of the reasons that it would not go up more and also it should not go up more because the earnings growth is not that great, but only thing is if it stops falling and a little bit going up and the trajectory is a little up and there is some confidence in improvement in numbers later on, then it just makes the fund managers more willing to go out on the curve and look for stocks which otherwise they would not look, if the feeling was that the market is just falling and going to go down a lot. So that optimism is all I need to be excited in looking at new companies, meeting new managements knowing that the backdrop is okay-okay or better than okay-okay.
To the point that you were making, I mean I am just wondering whether it is time now to look at those bottom-up stories. I mean, is that where tactically alpha generation would happen? It already has given you good returns in the last three months. Is that the space that you need to hunt now?
Samir Arora: You have to do bottom-up only because the backdrop is not so strong that just by being invested you will make a lot of money. You will do okay with that also. But as I said if you are comfortable with the overall market in the sense that it is holding up and that there are flows and there is interest and there are interest rate cuts and there is some economic recovery and the GDP growth was good and all that, but still you know at the back of the mind that this is not immediately leading to 15-18% earnings growth, then you look for companies that have 14-15% or more earnings growth which are not very many and that is the bottom-up thing you are searching for. If you can find them in sectors that you are otherwise comfortable with, that these are not protected sectors or highly competitive sectors or being disrupted sectors and so that is where the bottom-up is coming.
By
