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| Saath pagala aakaashma. Trans-lated into English, its means seven steps into the sky. That's the title of the book Nilesh Shah, director and chief investment officer (fixed income), Franklin Templeton Investment Managers is reading these days. |
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| It has got nothing to do with investing. But it is the one book that has made him a wiser man, says Shah. A Gujarati novel by Kundanika Kapadia, the book talks about equality of men and women. "It's a must read for all the married couples and soon to be married couples", says Shah, 35, married and father of two. That's one free advise you can get from him. For the rest, especially when it comes to investments, you better pay. After all, he calls the shots for the Rs 9,500 crore portfolio in debt schemes managed by Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund. Nilesh Shah is the Business Standard joint Fund Manager of the year, 2003. |
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| Shah is brilliant with numbers. But that's no big deal if you know that he is a gold medalist chartered accountant. For all that and more, Shah comes across as a perfect blend of confidence and humility. |
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| Investment management is one area where no one can make it big without making mistakes. Shah's biggest success factor: he made enough and more big mistakes right in the beginning, only to make him so much wiser in such a short span! |
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| Shah had his first brush with corporate finance at his first job with ICICI Securities. That was the place where he learnt the first crucial lessons about capital markets. "At that time, promoters could price issues at any price they wanted and every single issue that we managed at ICICI Securities failed to make any money for investors. It was a complete track record of failures," admits Shah. From that emerges a deep rooted sense of realisation that it is important to look at things from the investor's point of view. But he's waited for the swell after every ebb and ridden the tide improving his own record every time. |
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| In the world of debt, where it is ever so difficult to earn that little extra, what makes Shah the best? "Hard work and diligence" is Shah's answer. |
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| "In equities if you missed Infosys, you can always find another one which will fetch you block-buster returns. However in debt, each day is critical because even if you lose a day's interest, it's gone forever and you cannot retrieve it." Shah and his team work Monday through Saturday to make sure every rupee earns the maximum mileage possible. |
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| Not just that, Shah believes it is critical to get a feel of the market. So apart from regular information sharing and trend analysis that he has his team of three fund managers do anyway, Shah has a simple trick. "Brokers do not keep you informed if you don't trade. So we trade in small lots, sometimes only to gauge the market mood and see the flow," Shah says. |
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| Thanks to Shah's proactive strategy, Franklin Templeton Gilt Fund Liquid Plan ranked at number three for the last one-year period, on a risk-adjusted matrix, while the plain vanilla income fund Templeton India Income fund ranked among the top-5 risk adjusted performers in the category. |
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