High Spirits do the Vanishing Act
The presentation of the Union Budget 2021, which ignited the animal spirits of investors and enthused them no end, pushed the Indian markets to all-time highs within a couple of weeks. Further, the Indian benchmark indices were seen outperforming their western counterparts. However, after such exciting times the benchmark indices have more or less remained in a stipulated range with heightened intraday volatility. Also, due to lack of any decisive movement, the Indian markets have underperformed their western counterparts. The broader markets, which were seen outperforming benchmark indices in the earlier part of the month, have, of late, fizzled out.
The broader markets have lost their euphoria too and as a result in recent days they have started to relatively underperform the benchmark indices. This clearly indicates that the enthusiasm created by the bold and ground-breaking budget is gradually losing its crackle with the Nifty almost testing the same lows that were seen on the post-budget day i.e., February 2, 2021. The budget announcements triggered risk appetite for growth trade. As a result, smart money switched towards cyclical stocks like commodities, infrastructure, etc. Further, the aggressive disinvestment plan emphasised in the budget also attracted huge interest in public sector stocks.
Consequently, metals, infrastructure, realty and public sector stocks outperformed the markets in the wake of the budget. However, the ones that shined during the lockdown period, namely, pharmaceuticals, IT and FMCG have underperformed the markets in the last one and half months. In fact, the underperformance of Nifty Pharma and Nifty FMCG is so profound that both these sectoral indices yielded negative return on YTD basis. The outperformance by the metal sector could be attributed to a sharp spike in demand for industrial metals like copper, zinc, aluminium and even steel as capital investments, infrastructure rebuilding and factories get back on track.
Meanwhile, the dark horse post-budget was Nifty PSU Bank that outperformed the private sector peers by a wide margin. Much of this outperformance of PSU Bank occurred on the back of reforms and recapitalization, valuation gap and improving balance-sheets. However, profit-booking is quite evident in PSU Bank stocks as the index has seen a drop of nearly 19 per cent from the high. The too fast, too furious run-up which it had witnessed seems to have factored in all the positive narratives in the price. Hence, it’s time for some extra caution rather than exuberance in these stocks.
That’s because we have seen how in the past with the recency bias effect of assuming that the immediate past winners would keep repeating themselves, investors generally got sucked in when stocks start moving down only to later realise that the story had got over. So, preserving wealth should be a priority at this point in time over maximising profit. There is a solid reason why we advocate preserving wealth as a priority. Just as the famous saying goes, ‘the markets hate uncertainty’, the market is sensing uncertainty in the background since the corona virus cases have seen a sharp upsurge despite the vaccination drive and a hot summer. Further, day-by-day we are now seeing new restrictions being announced.
Hence, if these partial restrictions do not control the virus infection we might head for a complete lockdown, either across the country or in selective states such as, in particular, Maharashtra. This is because Maharashtra has so far accounted for bulk of the daily new cases. Maharashtra plays an important role in the country’s economy, contributing significantly to India’s GDP. A repeat of the lockdown could create economic turbulence once again. Additionally, the fear of rising bond yields that are showing no signs of retreat despite comforting comments from the US Federal may result in fund outflow from the Indian market. Overall, in the near-term the markets could see some downward pressure and the zone of 14,000- 14,200 could act as crucial support for the market.
