See no redemption pressure in Indian funds: EPFR

Brad Durham, MD at EPFR said the flows to India have been positive in the past few weeks and there was buying seen. He sees no redemption pressure in Indian funds. Inflows are seen from HSBC, Franklin Templeton and other big offshore funds, he said.

Excerpts from CNBC-TV18's exclusive interview with Brad Durham:

Q: What is that you have you seen in the past week or so for India specific funds and for money into India?

A: For India Funds that we track, they have seen inflows up until Wednesday of last week, which is the last weekly period that we had fund flow data for and that would make the fifth consecutive week of inflows. The daily flow data in the last couple of days as you indicated have been negative, but putting it in context certainly investor sentiment has returned to emerging market as a whole, India included.

Over the last five weeks emerging market equity funds have taken in about USD 12 billion which brings their year-to-date outflows to USD 8 billion. The India Country Funds have had inflows and other fund groups also have sizeable exposure to India. Global Emerging Market (GEM) Equity Funds have a 7% weighting to India and have had five weeks of inflows and the Asia Ex-Japan has had inflows. So overall the flow trends for India have been positive up until the last few days.

Q: Any specific names that have seen inflows now, the India specific ones and what would you put down to this outflow? Are you seeing or hearing of redemption pressures on any of the India or BRIC funds?

A: Not necessarily, I think just last few days it’s hard to call that a trend. I would prefer to look at the longer-term and I think in terms of individual names for the India funds, especially the bigger funds that we track get the lion's share of flow, the HSBC India fund, Franklin Templeton India funds  these are large offshore funds that are seeing the biggest inflows. But overall sentiments are still fairly good for India.

We have a data set that tracks money flows and the funds that’s a proxy group of about 1,000 equity funds of emerging and developed market funds and they were actually net buyers of Indian equities and February-March-April are big months of selling. So I think you are seeing some buying into the weakness and you are also seeing some investors increasingly attracted to ever low valuations in Indian equities, but obviously with inflation concerns that’s certainly troubling for a lot of investors.

Q: In that case what is the kind of potential money you see coming into India within the next three months given the kind of interest that you are experiencing?

A: I think it looks fairly positive. I think we track in total about USD 800 billion dedicated emerging market equity fund assets and I think over the fund groups that do have exposure to India as I mentioned, most of them are seeing inflows recently and these fund managers are going to be allocating proportionally across many of the country allocations that they currently have and India weight is about 7% currently.