| You don't have a million but want a fund manager to take care of your investments? This is no distant dream. You can avail of portfolio management services (PMS), with all the personalised attention, now even for a modest sum of Rs 5 lakh, as small and medium brokerages are making a beeline to launch PMS for the wider retail market. |
| "We are seeing retailisation of the PMS business. This service is mainly intended for those investors who are willing to take some amount of risk but do not have the time to manage their investments on a day-to-day basis," says C J George, managing director of Geojit Financial Services, which has over 500 clients under its PMS business. |
| It's a swelling business. Sebi-approved PMS providers manage an aggregate corpus of some Rs 22,000-25,000 crore, according to industry estimates. |
| Buoyant market conditions have seen increasing investor interest in the market, however, and PMS players think it is time to widen the net. And by today's standards, Rs 5 lakh is no longer much of an entry barrier. |
| "Earlier PMS was restricted to investors with investment potential of Rs 25-50 lakh," says Manish Bandi, head, PMS, India Infoline, "With salaries rising high and businesses growing, the class of customers who can invest around Rs 5-7 lakh is surging. Retail PMS aims to tap such clients." |
| Typically, in a bull market, PMS customers can expect returns of 25-30 per cent per annum, as they've got over the last three years. This is attracing even the risk-averse. |
| "A new class of investors, who have been conventionally hesitant to invest in the stock market, are now slowly turning to markets. This class has much investment potential that is yet untapped. With retail PMS, we are targeting this class," says Rakesh Mehta of Mehta Equities, which wants just Rs 5 lakh committed of its PMS customers and expects to mop up Rs 25 crore in six months. |
| Broking house Angel, with a corpus of more than Rs 50 crore, has two PMS offerings, commencing at Rs 5 lakh each, but with different risk profiles. |
| "Retail is proving to be the real growth story for all sectors. Firms offering good products at a decent price will gain in the long run," says Sudeep Moitra, vice-president, Angel Broking. |
| All this is not to suggest that the top-end PMS market is saturated. A recent DSP Merrill Lynch-Capgemini study has estimated 83,000 high net worth individuals (those with an investment surplus of $1 million or above) in India, a figure growing 20 per cent a year. |
| Merely 10 per cent of this wealth has so far been tapped by wealth managers, according to DSP Merrill Lynch head of global private client, Pradeep Dokania. |
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