Anoop Bhaskar weathered managerial uncertainty and weak markets to turn UTI Mutual Fund’s stocks into category outperformers
Picture this scenario: You work for a public sector fund house, where stakeholders cannot agree on who should head it. You have high-level manoeuvring to nominate the relative of a key finance ministry official, which the principal strategic investor is resisting. The sector regulator is not amused, and declines to allow the fund house to launch new schemes till it appoints a boss. And finally, a temporary acting CEO is appointed just to break the logjam.
In such a climate of uncertainty, you would expect a fund manager to play safe and not do much. More certainly, you would not expect him or his funds to appear at the top of the performance table. But Anoop Bhaskar appears to have insulated himself from all the chaos around him.
Last month, rating agency Crisil ranked UTI Mutual Fund, of which Bhaskar is head (equities), as the best performing fund during the March 2013 quarter. Five of the funds looked after by Bhaskar, including two that he manages directly, outperformed their categories by a wide margin.
UTI Opportunities Fund saw compound annual returns of 11.41 percent, beating the category performance of 4.49 percent over a period of three years; UTI Equity Fund returned 10.38 percent and outperformed the category by a similar margin for the same period. Meanwhile, UTI Opportunities Fund also topped rankings released by Morningstar, another close tracker of mutual fund performance.
The first thing he noted was the funds’ heavy concentration in some sectors or companies. Not only that, the funds seemed to follow their own stock-picking rules with no benchmark to measure performance. They were often driven by the preferences of their fund managers, which meant that individual preference outweighed processes.
2003: THE TURNING POINT
(This story appears in the 28 June, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)