Prajna Capital - An Investment Guide

A ir travel... don’t bother to fasten those seat belts. Flying has become too much of a luxury even for the well-heeled. For the rest, it’s good old Laloo rail. Before complaining about those stinking toilets, remind yourself you’re saving on astronomical airfares. Corporate honchos aren’t on this track just yet but they’ve been forced to downgrade from the luxuries of business class to humble economy. Just last month, a leading Indian bank asked its entire investment banking division to stop travelling business class. Babus, too, have to look for the cheapest flight deals after the Centre’s warning that leave travel allowance (LTA) isn’t a ticket to splurge. B ollywood’s shouting ‘cut, cut, cut.’ The stars have cut fees and producers their budgets. Actor Sanjay Dutt, who was charging Rs 15 crore, is back to a more affordable Rs 4-5 crore. Sanjay Dutt Productions CEO Dharam Oberoi explained that the actor thought it would be “unfair to hike his prices at a time when the industry i...

THE impending realignment of NSE indices on the basis of free-float market capitalisation has put index funds and exchange traded funds in a spot of bother. According to mutual fund analysts, the exchange-proposed changes in stock weightages will result in widening of tracking error in index funds. Index funds are passively-managed funds wherein the fund manager attempts to mirror the performance of a benchmark index, by investing the corpus in the index components in proportion to their weightage in the index. Tracking error is the difference between returns from the index fund to that of the index. Lower the tracking error, closer are the returns of the fund to that of the target index. Funds with tracking error lower than 1% are good performers, according to mutual fund analysts. The NSE-proposed shift in stock weightages could deviate fund returns (from index returns) in the range of 6-10%, industry sources said. There could be some tracking error as weightage realignment ...

Asset management companies ( AMCs ), which invest the pooled funds of retail investors in securities, are said to provide more diversification, liquidity, and professional management than individual investors can themselves manage. But a look at the stocks held by 28 asset management companies show that one-third of their assets is invested in only 10 stocks. Their favourite 10 being: RIL, SBI, Bharti, ONGC, ICICI Bank, Infosys, Bhel, L&T, HDFC Bank and HDFC. AMCs of fund-houses such as Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Benchmark Asset Management, Deutsche Asset Management and LIC Mutual Fund Asset Management have invested funds to the tune of Rs 200 crore to Rs 1,100 crore in these 10 stocks. This means that this type of top-heavy form of AMCs' equity portfolio could be affected by a swing in just a few stocks. As per latest data, AMCs held maximum assets in form of shares in RIL (Rs 4,592 crore), followed by SBI (Rs 3,855 crore), Bharti (Rs 3,508 crore), ONGC (Rs 2,995...

IT Firms will see their EBITDA margins plunge below 20% over the next 3 years TOP Indian tech firms such as TCS, Wipro and HCL will see their EBITDA margins, a measure of operating profit, plunge below 20% over the next three years, as these companies move more information technology projects to India, and align their operations with rising wages apart from the currency fluctuations. Leading outsourcing customers such as General Electric, Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of America plan to increase their offshore outsourcing in order to lower their cost of managing IT in the US and UK, where billing rates are more than twice of what can be achieved by sending work to offshore locations such as India. It’s going to be growth vs margin dilemma for us — till now, we have protected our margins and fared better than the likes of IBM and EDS. However, in the long run, I would say that even 15% of EBITDA will stand much better than our rivals who hardly achieve 10%. EBITDA (short f...