Recent IPOs catch MF's fancy

The recent slide in the stock market has seen mutual funds lapping up shares of Snowman Logistics, Sharda CropChem and Shemaroo Entertainment (firms which went in for initial public offerings recently) after they slipped 15-20 per cent from their all-time highs in the past few weeks. Sharda Cropchem is attracting the maximum attention, with as many as nine fund houses buying the company's shares. These include top names such as HDFC Mutual Fund, ICICI Mutual Fund, SBI Mutual Fund, L&T and others. Shares of Shemaroo were bought by Birla and DSP BlackRock. Reliance Mutual Fund and L&T Mutual Fund bought Snowman Logistics. The S&P Sensex is down almost two per cent in the last month.

Regulatory language
The debate over promotion of Hindi seemed to have also found an echo in the stock market. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) issued a tender last month for 'translation of various documents from English to Hindi and vice versa.' For the record, the stock market regulator has always conducted activities for promoting the official language.The Sebi staff portal has previously featured a daily Hindi 'word of the day' besides incentive schemes for using the language; and this latest tender may well be an extension of the same. But it is unlikely to be badly received in Delhi nevertheless.

Fund managers seek winners in realty
Despite problems being faced by some of the leading real estate companies such as DLF and Unitech, select stocks may soon get attention from mutual and insurance fund managers. The reason: They believe that some of these stocks are grossly undervalued. The entire listed real estate space comprising 98 companies has a market capitalisation of Rs 99,896 crore. Eighteen companies, including TCS, ONGC, RIL, ITC and Infosys , have higher market capitalisation. "In such a situation, there has to be a few winners at least in this sector," says a fund manager.