Fidelity Fund Management today launched a fund - Fidelity Special Situations Fund - the first of its kind in India. Structured as an open-ended equity fund, it aims to deliver long-term growth by investing across the spectrum of Indian equities with a focus on companies in out-of-ordinary situations. Speaking at the launch, Ashu Suyash, country head of Fidelity Fund Management, said: "The are a number of transformational events that are taking place in India today, which often put companies in special situations."Some illustrative list of special situations include turnarounds, companies whose growth characteristics have not yet been adequately recognised, companies that sell at significant discount to their underlying assets, companies having a unique product with strong demand potential or opportunities to use existing resources for generating new business streams, companies that are potential candidates for mergers and acquisitions or restructuring and out-of-favour stocks which display improving fundamentals. Rajesh Singh, fund manager of Fidelity India Special Situations Fund, said: "At the heart of the investment strategy is identifying companies in special situations, which requires rigorous 360 degree, bottom-up research. This is true to Fidelity's approach to managing investments, which is predicated on bottom-up stock picking backed by intensive research by our team of investment professionals."Fidelity India Special Situations Fund is a more aggressive fund that will strive to add higher Alpha to the portfolio over the long-term, and should be an interesting style diversifier for investors." Alpha measures a fund's risk-adjusted return in excess of returns generated by the market or the benchmark index.Fidelity currently runs two funds in the country - Fidelity Equity Fund and Fidelity Tax Advantage Fund - with a combined corpus of over Rs 3,000 crore. Though it is too short a time period to comment on the performance of Fidelity Funds in the country, its maiden fund - Fidelity Equity Fund - is less than a year old, and data shows that Fidelity has so far managed to be in the middle of pack.According to data sourced from Value Research, Fidelity Equity Fund has posted a return of 30.03% over the past six months and is ranked Number 71 among the 135 diversified equity funds tracked by Value Research.
