Global uncertainties and weak corporate earnings are enough to give any fund manager the jitters. Yet, fund managers at DSP BlackRock Mutual Fund and HDFC Mutual Fund were able to navigate these with aplomb, walking away with the Business Standard Fund Manager of the Year awards in the equity and debt categories, respectively.
Beating their peers and benchmarks in their respective categories, Vinit Sambre of DSP BlackRock Mutual Fund topped the equity category, while Anil Bamboli of HDFC Mutual Fund emerged the winner in the debt category. They stood out because of their investment strategies, their conviction to stay put as well as their ability to gauge the impact of events that others may have not spotted.
This is one of the few instances when a fund manager running a small-cap fund has won the award in the equities category. Sambre has used bouts of underperformance as opportunities to buy businesses with good fundamentals, all the while focussing on a bottom-up stock-picking approach. As Sambre puts it, "It is not just about getting higher returns but also minimising risks on the quality aspects."
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Despite following a safety-first approach, Bamboli was able to take measured risks and play on duration to maximise returns in the debt schemes managed by him. His bet that interest rates would fall helped him outperform. "Our broad outlook in the last two years was that inflation will fall and interest rates will be cut. And, wherever possible we have tried to increase duration," he says.
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The winners were decided by a distinguished jury led by G N Bajpai, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India as well as the Life Insurance Corporation of India. The other members of the jury were IndAsia Fund Advisors Chairman Pradip Shah, Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services director & group CIO Vibhav Kapoor, and Centrum Capital Director K R Kamath.
