Cement a safer and better bet than steel for next few months: Rakesh Arora

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Rakesh Arora, Managing Partner, Go India Stocks, says “cement is our preferred pick for the next few months. In steel, largely it is the long products which are seeing some bit of an uptick. But China has been producing a lot of steel and they have been exporting and so steel prices have not really been moving up in the global market. Any hint of a little bit of demand pickup is resulting in raw metal prices, iron ore and coking coal moving much ahead of steel prices.”

Everybody is stunned by the magnitude of market fall yesterday. In isolation it looks ugly, but do you think that was an overbought market which was looking for a reason to correct? And unfortunately yesterday was that day.
It is a minor correction in the whole scheme of things. And actually stocks are stabilising today, so I do not really see too much worry. Obviously, when something is overbought, such corrections are welcome and then only the strength of the up move can actually, the strength is much better if there are these kinds of corrections during the up move.

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I am going to now shift to your core expertise; metal, cement, and channel checks are indicating that another round of price hike has been announced. Is this largely in order to meet the inflationary pressure which has come back or is this pricing power coming back?
It is neither. Basically August has been a very lean month in terms of monsoon and construction activity has really picked up quite dramatically. We are into a pre-election year and I