fund

Under pressure to perform well, MFs bought & sold these stocks in December quarter


NEW DELHI: With back clearly to the wall after a not so pleasant year for equities, mutual funds (MFs) went about recasting their portfolios a bit in the December quarter.

They made changes to their holdings in 220 out of 850-odd companies that have reported their December quarter shareholding so far, data available with AceEquity suggest.

While their stake went up by more than 1 per cent in at least 41 stocks, there was a drop in exposure in 23 others during the period.

Portfolio rejigs

Midcap IT stocks were on the radar as the domestic fund houses bought additional stakes in MindTree by 2.15 per cent and L&T Infotech (up 1.43 per cent) while they reduced stake in KPIT Technologies by 1.5 per cent. They added shares of housing financiers such as LIC Housing Finance (up 1.32 per cent) and Repco Home Finance (up 6.7 per cent), but cut stake in PNB Housing Finance (down 1 per cent).

Pharma stocks JB Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals and Indoco Remedies, where the holding went up by 1.99 per cent and 1.44 per cent, respectively, were snapped up over Divi’s Labs (down 2.2 per cent) and Granules India (down 3.4 per cent).

Oil plays IOC (up 2.32 per cent), ONGC (up 1.49 per cent) and an oil-derivative Spicejet (up 1.33 per cent) caught MFs hooked while metal and mining stocks such as Nalco (down 2.1 per cent) and Jindal Steel (down 1.5 per cent) lost their lustre a bit.

Among the 41 firms where MF exposure rose, only 15 could outperform Sensex’s 4 per cent return in the past three months while 21 delivered negative returns of up to 21 per cent.

Among the 23 firms where MFs cut their holdings in the December quarter, none could outperform Sensex, the data showed.

Heightened activity

Repco Home, among others, buzzed with activity, where domestic funds raised their stakes by 6.7 percentage points to 24.9 per cent in October-December, from 18.2 per cent in the September quarter.

Dixon Technologies (up 5 per cent), IFGL Refractories (up 4.8 per cent), Control Point (3.6 per cent) and Automotive Axles (2.3 per cent) were some other stocks that saw high MF buying during the quarter. None mentioned could beat Sensex returns in the last three months.

A few largecap stocks also saw heavy buying by mutual funds. Institutional investors raised their stake in Axis Bank to 13.9 per cent in the three months to December, from 10 per cent in the previous quarter. They hiked stake in Coal India by 3.6 percentage points to 5.4 per cent, ACC by 2.7 percentage points to 8.9 per cent and Infosys by 1.3 percentage points to 12.8 per cent and SBI by almost 1 per cent to 13.22 per cent.

Bharat Financial Inclusion, Arvind Granules India, Astra Microwave Products, Lakshmi Machine Works and PSP Projects saw mutual funds selling to the tune of 2.2-3.9 per cent during the quarter.

Mutual fund categories such as smallcap, midcap and multicap logged up to 21 per cent fall in assets they managed in the last one year.

That said, these schemes, on an average, have returned 5-7 per cent in the last three months. Data suggest that monthly SIP inflows into funds continued to remain strong despite the market weakness, which led to strong Rs 25,300 crore worth of inflows into equities by domestic institutional investors during the quarter gone by.





READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.