ETMarkets PMS Talk | PMS strategies set to outperform mutual funds in next couple of years: Sushant Bhansali

In an exclusive conversation with ETMarkets, Sushant Bhansali, CEO of Ambit Asset Management on the sidelines of the APMI conference in Mumbai, said that Portfolio Management Services (PMS) are poised to outperform mutual funds in the next couple of years as market breadth narrows and only a select set of companies deliver superior earnings growth.

Concentrated PMS portfolios, he noted, will be better placed to capitalise on these opportunities compared to large mutual funds, which often hold 100-plus stocks due to their size.

Bhansali, who is also the Vice-Chairman of the Association of Portfolio Managers in India (APMI) board highlighted that concentrated PMS portfolios, unlike large mutual funds holding 100-plus stocks, are better positioned to capture alpha.

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Kshitij Anand: Let me start off with one big question that’s on everyone’s mind: how will India perform in terms of alpha generation? How do you see the next few years playing out? Will we be able to mimic the performance of the past?
Sushant Bhansali: I would say that in the last few years, alpha generation was actually very difficult because anything and everything was working.

To outperform, you probably needed to take more risk—both in terms of allocations and position sizing—as well as identifying whether you were in the top 20–30% of companies in terms of earnings growth.

In the next two or three years, given the current state of the economy, alpha generation will become a lot easier if you play it right. That’s because only select companies will deliver higher earnings growth, while a vast majority will not.

So, by both avoiding companies that won’t deliver and allocating more capital to those that will, you can create immense value—similar to how things played out between 2018 and 2020.

In the two to three years before COVID, within the Nifty itself, only about five to seven stocks delivered superb returns—some growing more than 30% CAGR—while the index as a whole delivered single-digit returns. I think we are in a similar cycle now.

Kshitij Anand: So, portfolio rebalancing will become more important in the current circumstances?
Sushant Bhansali: I would say the churn will actually be lower compared to the past. Earlier, we had to continuously move from one stock to another to capture the next high-growth opportunity.

Now, with fewer such opportunities available, investors will likely stick to the names that are delivering and continue to hold them.

Kshitij Anand: And it’s not market-cap agnostic, you feel?
Sushant Bhansali: It will happen across segments. As I mentioned, it happened within the Nifty, and below that too—whether you look at midcaps or smallcaps—the overall universe will likely see 20–30% of companies performing very differently from the remaining 60–70%.

Opportunities will be present across market-cap segments. What’s needed is more research and conviction to differentiate yourself.

Alpha generation will especially come on the PMS side, I would say, because PMS strategies typically run concentrated portfolios. In contrast, many diversified portfolios—especially large mutual funds—now hold 100 or more stocks due to their size.

From that perspective, PMS will likely differentiate meaningfully well over the next two years compared to the last three to four years when everything worked. It’s not that PMS didn’t perform, but even mutual funds performed well during that period.

Kshitij Anand: The Bharat theme became very popular, especially since 2014, and remains so. Defence has delivered multi-bagger kind of returns. Is there any theme that’s currently on top of your mind, in focus now, or could be in focus over the next few years? We were thinking that post-Budget, consumption could play a big role because the government was focused on boosting it, and that indeed seemed to come through. But now we are seeing some plateauing in performance there. Is there any theme you have in mind?
Sushant Bhansali: Ultimately, things that haven’t worked in the past one or two quarters—or even the past one or two years—often start working in the next one or two years or quarters.

You have to be contrarian to identify sector rotation, as we call it. I think that will take place, and consumption stocks, in particular, haven’t done that well in the last one to one-and-a-half years.

So, over the next one to one-and-a-half years, especially with tax breaks, lower interest rates, higher liquidity, and what I would call a bonanza for government employees expected in the coming quarters, all of these together should boost consumption.

Rural is also coming back—thanks to what looks like a good monsoon this year—after struggling for the last three to four years. I think post-COVID, rural has been really struggling, so that theme should play out.

We are expecting a bumper performance… In fact, all the companies we’ve spoken to on the consumption side—whether listed or unlisted—seem very excited.

They have built up a lot of inventory, something they hadn’t done in the last one or two seasons. Everyone is expecting a bumper H2, but if it doesn’t happen, there is a big risk of a significant market correction.

Kshitij Anand: A quick final question on the earnings front. So far, it’s been a mixed season. What are your expectations for the next few quarters?
Sushant Bhansali: Earnings have been more or less in line for Q4 and even Q1 so far, but that doesn’t show you the true picture. They’ve been in line, but expectations were already quite muted.

So, everyone seems content with them. If you look at most research reports, they tend to highlight something else—like volume growth coming back, inventory levels coming down, or working capital improving—and then mention towards the end that PAT is down or up only 4%.

That tells you about the market environment, where corporates are really struggling on the earnings front.

This season, there’s still about a week left for all companies to report. But our guess is that by the end of the season, no more than 20% of companies will be able to deliver 15% earnings growth.

If you look at recent history over the past five years, as many as 60–70% of companies were delivering that growth, and for a few quarters, even more than that. But this has been dwindling over the last four quarters.

That said, given the base effect, we believe that probably after Q2 results—starting from Q3—we will begin to see high single-digit earnings growth across the board, with the number of companies delivering 15% growth rising from 15–20% now to 25–30%, and eventually to 40–50% over the next few quarters.

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