Large-caps & Reits: India’s largest investment adviser’s shifts
₹45,000 crore in assets, Waterfield is currently India’s largest registered investment adviser. The firm is majority-owned by Rajan but has minority stakes held by the Patni Family Office and Zephyr Management, its overseas partner. Excluding her stake in Waterfield, the bulk of Rajan’s money is in the public markets.
This money is invested in equities—both direct stocks and mutual funds. The rest is split almost equally between debt funds (target maturity) and Reits/InvITs.Most of this (75%) is in large-cap stocks with the balance in mid and small caps. Rajan also mostly uses passive funds (index funds) for her large-cap allocation because active mutual funds have stopped outperforming benchmarks in the past several years.
Worried about the froth in mid and small caps, Rajan shifted from them to large caps last year. She also added Reits and InvITs to the fixed-income part of her portfolio. The 2023 Budget made debt mutual funds taxable at a slab rate regardless of the holding period.
Hence, Rajan has been putting her fresh debt money in Reits and InvITs, which invest in completed and revenue-generating real estate and infra projects, and are relatively stable. Rajan stopped renewing her life insurance policies once she had accumulated a sufficiently large portfolio. She continues with this stance.
Rajan has also begun putting more of her money in private markets (unlisted space) such as venture capital and early-stage growth funds. About 30% of her portfolio sits there—in FoFs launched by Waterfield itself andfunds run by women managers. The maiden Waterfield FoF was launched in 2022, predominantly investing in venture capital.
Read more on livemint.com
