Mkts to trade sideways for a while: Macquarie

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Macquarie Capital Securities has a positive bias on India and sees the US economy improving. In an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18, Mark Matthews of Macquarie Capital Securities said Indian markets should continue to trade sideways. He remains bulish on dollar.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with Mark Matthews on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: It's been a very sideways a couple of sessions. How are you feeling about the market?

A: I am feeling sideways about them. I can't profess to being outrageously bullish but I am not very bearish either. We are just in one of those periods where the markets are doing what they should be doing which is just trundling sideways.

Q: You have just done a poll of more than 150 money managers across Asia and the mood did not come out as particularly table thumping bullish?

A: That's correct. We did a poll of market watchers-150 people-in Hong Kong and Singapore. We found that 55% were bearish, 25% were bullish and 20% were what I would call agnostic. But that should be positively interpreted because you want them to be more bearish than bullish means these people haven't owned stocks yet. So I do not think that's a negative thing.

Q: Was there any further colour on whether they were circumspect about entire region or global equities per se and within that did you find more leaning towards either China or India or both?

A: We monitor fund flows and so we have some granularity on some specific countries and what is interesting is the entire month of February foreigners were net sellers of Asian stocks but last week and the week before we have two consecutive weeks now where foreigners have been buyers and specifically what they seem to like the most right now is South East Asia. They are buying a lot of Thailand, Indonesia. They are also buying quite a bit Korea and with India reasonable-I wouldn't say very large amount of buying.