Women must actively participate in wealth creation: Amisha Vora

On Women’s Day special,  Amisha Vora, Joint Managing Director, Prabhudas Lilladher advices women to actively participate in wealth creation.

According to her largecaps would make good investments and recommends ICICI Bank among them and Jubilant Life from the midcap space.

From the cement  pack she likes Ultratech Cement from large cap space and JK Lakshmi from midcaps. Below is the transcript of Amisha Vora’s interview with Ekta Batra on CNBC-TV18. Ekta: Want to kick off the conversation by asking a stock or a number of stocks that you would recommend to all the moms, sisters, wives out there to buy and put their money in? A: Coming to investments, women have always been doing better and this is reflected in the fact that most of the large financial institutions are handled by women in the Indian context, be it and you know it very well, most of the large banks as well as mutual fund or asset management. So, I would encourage all women to aggressively and actively participation in their families’ savings and wealth generation. Coming to particular stock idea, I would think that still the time is there for them to look at the largecaps and within largecaps, I would recommend ICICI Bank, because I believe that in the valuation, a lot of problems of asset quality is already captured. But as we move forward, the way Jaiprakash got sorted out and more such large groups get sorted out by selling their assets, the clouds of fear which are looming large will get little backside and maybe a quarter or two of issues but they will bounce back very well on their performance. So, ICICI Bank is a very good investment idea. Coming to some midcap stock ideas, from our house we have been recommending Jubilant Life which is a pharmaceutical cum chemical company and they are heading towards good growth for the next two years. We also like within the cement space, we think a good movement is happening and one should look at the cement stocks, though in largecap UtraTech Cement and in the midcap, JK Lakshmi are our preferred picks in the cement stocks. Within the finance segment, we like two stocks, L&T Finance have come to almost one time book, the way they started, almost 5-8 years back their journey. So, that is a very good investment and Capital First is a new baby on the horizon, but very aggressively doing job in consumer finance. So, their return on equity (ROE) expansion will be reasonably very good over the next two years and extremely good pedigree held by Wabag, so that is another stock which we like quite a lot. Ekta: We have seen a good leap for the Nifty from the 52-week low that we hit on Budget day. Your sense in terms of whether we have bottomed out after rallying over 650 points now from that 52-week low? A: Our feeling is that year ahead and particularly next couple of quarters would still be a little volatile both in global markets and in India also. From Indian perspective, of course, GST, RBI move and above all, the monsoon will set the tone but globally also, jury is still not out as to Fed’s next move and that may continue to create a little bit of a ripple as we move to the Fed’s next move. So, I would say that yes, we have shown a smart recovery, but volatility still cannot be ruled out and markets would be a more range bound one. Ekta: What about foreign institutional investors (FII) flows? 3-4 sessions of consecutive FII buying, but domestic institutional investor (DII). Do you think that the corner might have turned and now we might see FII flows as opposed to outflows? A: FII flows globally are dependent on a couple of things. Of course, the emerging market outlook and selling from some of the sovereign funds largely from the oil producing countries? Both of these factors on a very sustainable basis does not seem to me that have changed. So, at times, based on the currency outlook or based on a recovery outlook, the money would have started pouring in, but the fundamental two questions are still not answered very positively. So, FII flows, itself, because of which we think markets will be volatile would remain a little choppy going forward also. Ekta: And lastly, we have seen commodities rally. It is really the talk of the market in today’s trading session. Iron ore prices are up 19 percent in the past 48 hours. Brent Crude back at USD 40 per barrel. Would you be a buyer in the likes of the NMDCs and the Vedantas of the world and have commodities troughed out? A: Once again, from a very extremely negative, both prices and sentiment, there is a very smart recovery, but as we see, particularly non-oil, oil is a slightly different commodity, but if we come to the metals and iron ore and other segments, we think that the issues are too large to be tackled soon. So, once when you are oversold, you show a smart recovery. But that is kind of a recovery from the bottom and still the pain would continue. So, we would think that these would more be a trading segment, rather than a pure investment kind of plays.