Marcellus orienting portfolios towards bottom-up stock picking: Rakshit Ranjan

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Rakshit Ranjan of Marcellus Investment Managers says markets have run ahead of fundamentals and hence, if one wants to pick up stocks where upside from positive surprises can come, it requires a lot of bottom-up picking rather than any top-down or broader sectoral calls.

Further, Marcellus used to have a far greater exposure to specialty chemicals space in some of their funds until about a year, year-and-a-half ago. It is relatively low now. There are some companies in their small and midcap portfolios where supply side issues are much less worrisome now as compared to about six months ago. These are more B2B and export-oriented chemical companies.
What are the expectations with respect to earnings because a large part of the Street believes that we had run up ahead of fundamentals and now earnings have peaked and there are chances of more downgrades than upgrades?
Rakshit Ranjan: I agree with your broad assessment. There are two types of challenges at the moment in the stock markets that investors should be aware of. One is earnings are going to be adversely affected by weak external macro and hence, a lot of bottom-up stock picking to ensure you pick up only those companies where earnings growth is coming through despite weak macro is required.

The second challenge, as you mentioned, is markets have run ahead of fundamentals and hence, if you want to pick up cheap stocks or stocks where upside from positive surprises can come from, the names again require a lot of bottom-up picking rather than any top-down or