Sabharwal, Soni are BS Fund Managers

SBIMF's Sabharwal bags the equity award, while DAM's Soni wins it for the debt segment.

Sandip Sabharwal, vice-president and head of equities in SBI Mutual Fund (SBIMF), is the Business Standard Equity Fund Manager of the Year 2004-05, while Suresh Soni, director and head of fixed income, Deutsche Asset Management (DAM), is the Debt Fund Manager of the year.

Sabharwal, who manages around Rs 3,600 crore of assets, gets the award for the outstanding performance of SBI Global Fund, which closed the year-ended June 2005 with a 111 per cent return.

The fund had the highest Sharpe ratio of 0.28, which measures excess returns over the risk-free return delivered by a fund manager per unit of risk.

Soni, who manages over Rs 3,000 crore of assets, gets the award for Deutsche's floating-rate fund, which managed a one-year return of 4.87 per cent and a Sharpe ratio of 0.54. The good performance of the fund was reflected in its assets growth"" from Rs 24 crore in April 2004 to Rs 867 crore currently.

To choose the best Fund Managers of the Year, Business Standard has worked on the well-accepted premise that fund management is not all about returns, but also risks.

The risk-weighted returns have been calculated by estimating the return per unit of risk for schemes for the last one year. The findings have been published in the Business Standard Fund Manager, our annual magazine of mutual funds, which is being distributed free with Friday's edition.

The magazine also carries a round-table discussion with the six best fund managers in the country on whether the Sensex rally can last and how far it can go.

The panel, which included Sanjiv Duggal, CIO, HSBC Mutual Fund, S Naganath, president and CIO, DSP Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, Prashant Jain, CIO, HDFC Mutual Fund, AK Sridhar, ED, UTI Mutual Fund, Madhusudan Kela, head of equities, Reliance Mutual Fund and Nilesh Shah, CIO, Prudential ICICI Mutual Fund, was unanimous in its view: equities would continue to do well as long as liquidity continued, and liquidity should continue as long as the Indian economy remained one of the fastest growing in the world and corporate earnings growth was impressive.

The team agreed on a corporate earnings growth of 15-18 per cent growth.

Though some of the panelists did feel that to the extent the markets were driven by large global flows, event risks could dampen sentiment and performance.

As for mutual funds, the going should be strong, the panelists felt. Diversified funds as a category posted average returns of 56.03 per cent, which was better than the 50.01 per cent and 47.49 per cent managed by the Sensex and Nifty, respectively, in the one-year period ending June 30, 2005.

Overall, nearly 59 per cent of diversified funds have outperformed the Sensex for the past one year. Over a three-year period, the performance of funds is even more impressive. A whopping 91 per cent of equity funds have outperformed the Sensex during the period.