'Our portfolios will be constant, give or take 15 per cent'

Harshad Borawake, the Head-Equity Research and Fund Manager at Mirae Asset Investment Managers (India), has been with the fund house since 2016. With nearly two decades of experience under his belt, Borawake manages Mirae Asset Hybrid Equity Fund as well as the AMC's balanced advantage and equity savings offerings. We recently sat down with him to discuss his views on the market, Mirae's investment criteria and why the outperformance of the aggressive hybrid fund he oversees (Mirae Asset Hybrid Equity Fund) has narrowed in recent years. The following is an edited excerpt from our conversation. The developed economies are either in recession or likely to slip into one. We are also seeing geopolitical conflicts becoming a recurring thing of late. Do you see this as an opportunity or concern for the Indian economy and market? The global context is largely driven by inflation, which, in turn, is driven by the supply chain issues, followed by the pandemic and then the Russia-Ukraine war. In order to curtail inflation, central banks globally took a forced reversal of the interest rate. So, over a 10-11-year period (from the Global Financial Crisis till 2020-21), we saw interest rates largely going down, which has only reversed in the last one-and-a-half to two years. Against the backdrop of this sharp reversal in interest rates, the expected recession/slowdown is a forced one. If you notice, it's not like the underlying economic activity is indicating recession, it's more at the headline level that we are hearing things like GDP numbers will be negative. Now, India has a slightly different context vis-a-vis the global economy from the perspective of the pandemic impact. A large population of the developed countries weren't that much impacted, given the dole outs from the government. However, the economic impact in India was relatively higher, mainly on the service sector. And we can see that this sector was the last to make a comeback. We are still in

This article was originally published on October 23, 2023.