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| Fund Focus |
24th June 2011 |
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| DSP Blackrock Balanced Fund | ||||
| Apurva Shah, Executive VP, DSP Blackrock Investment Managers | ||||
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A fine balance within a balanced fund is perhaps the best way one can define Apurva Shah's fund strategy for the equity component of the DSP Blackrock Balanced Fund. After a long period of consistently outperforming its benchmark, the fund ran into a bit of rough weather towards the end of last year, before re-discovering its winning ways in recent months. Apurva Shah discusses his fund strategy, performance and his sectoral preferences….. |
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Fund Managed By : Apurva Shah (Equity) and Kushal Choksi (Debt) Fund Benchmark : Crisil Balanced Fund Index Fund Strategy The balanced fund is a replica of our DSP Blackrock Equity Fund as far as the equity portion is concerned and the fixed income portion is managed conservatively by our fixed income team. The equity strategy is a combination of strategies of two funds into one on a roughly 50-50 basis. We have the DSP Blackrock Top 100 Fund which invests in companies in the top 100 by market cap and then we have the DSP Blackrock Small and Midcap Fund, which buys companies outside the top 100- in other words, from the entire market. The equity portion of the DSP Blackrock Balanced Fund is therefore a flexi-cap fund, but with a predefined 50-50 mix. About 75% of the fund is invested into equities in the manner described, the rest 25% is invested in debt instruments. Since this fund does not take a call on what market cap theme will perform, over the long term it gives good exposure to the entire breadth of the market. During periods when one segment of the market has outperformed the other by a wide margin, then we reallocate based on the changed weightage. Thus it amounts to some kind of value buying. We monitor from time to time whether our ratio is being maintained. Fund Performance
Performance Commentary Our performance has improved from January. Sometimes big ticket purchases or sales by some select FIIs can distort the markets for a period of time and if you are not positioned to benefit from that with the same stocks, in that period you take a hit. Eventually you come back when the situation normalizes. In the longer term the performance has been good because of the discipline we maintain and the flexi-cap approach we adopt. Sectoral and thematic preferences In terms of sectoral stance, we have been underweight on banking for some time and we have been overweight on capital goods. One sector we are structurally overweight is agriculture and related businesses. |
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