Buy the world: Devina Mehra’s advice for Indian investors

They say, ‘Home is where the heart is’. When it comes to money, however, Devina Mehra, founder and chairperson of securities firm First Global, strongly feels that part of it should be parked outside of the home country.

“Wherever possible, we like to buy individual stocks and securities globally. In certain markets, because of regulatory reasons, stocks cannot be purchased directly, in which case we may get exposure via country ETFs (Exchange-traded funds)," said Mehra, who runs a global fund out of Cayman Island.

She invests 80% of her portfolio in her global fund and the rest in her India PMS fund. “We have bought South African Reits, Chinese shoemakers and Australian mine companies." She speaks to Mint about her investing strategy, global stocks, Chinese markets, the dollar index and more. Edited excerpts:

We actually prefer looking at individual stocks. Most of our portfolio is bottom-up stock picking. That said, we do sometimes make country bets by looking at how countries have performed over time.

This is not investment advice, but I’ll give you one example. We track 42 countries' indices. This includes the major developed and emerging markets. What we’ve noticed is that the indices which are at the bottom, 39th to 42nd rank tend to become top performers in the coming years. For instance, Nasdaq was among the bottom-ranked in 2022, but became a top performer the next year.

Even geographies that have real issues, like Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, etc., that have performed poorly often see a complete reversal. If a country is going through issues, it does not necessarily mean it will stay like that forever—at least as far as the stock market is concerned. For all you know, if the crash is too sharp, the rebound is