Chris Wood launches India-focused long-term equity portfolio of 16 stocks

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Chris Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies launched a dedicated long-only India portfolio of 16 stocks. This includes bluechip names like ICICI Bank, State Bank of India, Reliance Industries and Maruti Suzuki. In his weekly GREED & fear newsletter, the market expert added that this is certainly not a perfect time to start an Indian portfolio since the Sensex is near an all-time high.

Still GREED & fear remains convinced that India is at the start of a new housing cycle after a seven-year downturn, after the mother of all consolidations in the developer industry, which is why there will be a 17% weighting in the property sector.

“This portfolio will be domestic demand focused though it will have a decent energy weighting to hedge, in part at least, the obvious risk of a higher oil price on Indian financials and other interest rate-sensitive sectors. GREED & fear remains bullish on oil,” Wood said, adding staying in Asia, GREED & fear will take the opportunity of the start of the new quarter to launch a long-only India portfolio similar to the existing long-only Japan and China portfolios.

Overall, he has given 40% weightage to financials, 10% to energy, 17% to real estate, 10% to auto, 5% to the consumer, 4% to materials and 4% to logistics companies in his India-dedicated portfolio. His long-only equity portfolio also included players like Container Corporation, Tata Steel, Jubilant FoodWorks, TVS Motor, DLF, Century Textiles, Godrej Properties, ONGC, ICICI Lombard General Insurance, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Bajaj Finance and HDFC.

Wood added that India has always had a significant representation in his long-only Asia ex-Japan portfolio. This portfolio was launched nearly 19 years ago, but for some reason, a dedicated portfolio for India was not created.