Market Watch: Manish Jain, Head-Fund Management, Centrum
On Nifty
from a medium-term perspective, by the end of this calendar year, I’m still very optimistic that you will see closer to 27,000-28,000 levels of Nifty, which is assuming that the P/E multiples continue to remain constant at around 21 times or thereabouts.
So you will see markets rallying on the back of earnings growth. I’m fairly optimistic that you will see an acceleration of earnings growth standing where you are today, going into the Q1, I will be very surprised if Nifty does not report closer to 12-13% sort of earnings growth in Q1 and a similar level for FY26 as well.
On sectors
Sectors that I am positive on number one are going to be rate sensitives. You’ve seen inflation’s footprint at a six year low. I’ll be very surprised again if RBI does not do two more rate cuts of 25 basis points each. So sectors like real estate, auto, discretionary, consumption, these are something that I would favour.
Pharma continues to look very steady. But the dark horse for me, if you have a one-and-a-half-year sort of an investment horizon, are going to be larger banks. That is one space where I would look at the risk-reward being very favourable at this juncture, where valuations are very benign.
Large-cap stocks, some of which are trading at 10-year low valuations. And yet, everything from an asset quality perspective, as well as from a credit growth perspective, seems to have bottomed out. (edited)