 "What are FIIs thinking?")
Indian markets are finding it difficult to find a ground footing with the benchmark Sensex falling over 300 points, slipping below 16,000 mark in the morning trade. Foreign institutional investors are in no mood to put their big bucks in India with Indian and foreign brokerages cutting Sensex estimates, the latest one coming from CLSA downgrading the Sensex targets to 18,200 for 12 months.
[caption id=“attachment_70456” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“FIIs have been bullish to the financial services sector. Sergio Perez/Reuters”]
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Almost as a corollary comes the heavy sell offs by FIIs, doing away with shares worth Rs 1440 crore even on Thursday according to the provisional data produced by the RBI. In August itself, FIIs have sold shares worth Rs9,109 crore.
So what are the sectors that FIIs have been bullish about and what are the stocks they have sold heavily?
•Except for consumers and industrials (loosely conveying manufacturing and infrastructure stocks), the FIIs have sold across all sectors. In industrials the biggest buying has been in L&T andMundraPort.
•Key buys: L&T, ONGC, HDFC Bank, Power Finance, Asian Paints, ITC and HUL.
•Key sells were: Infosys, SBI, Cairn, Siemens, IDFC and RIL.
•Bank of America Merrill Lynch report shows FIIs have been bullish to the financial services sector with five financial companies featuring among the top 10 foreign institution over owned companies. They are HDFC, SBI, ICICI, Indusind Bank and Canara Bank. But the extent to which the FIIs were bullish on banks have come down due to selling in this segment as well.
•IT remained the biggest underweight for the FIIs as the sector saw biggest amount of selling. They sold Infosys and Patni but brought TCS and Mahindra Satyam. Infosys, TCS and Wipro: all three major IT stocks feature in the list of top stocks on which FIIs are bearish.
•Energy sector also saw bearish sentiments by FIIs. But the numbers do not reflect the full intensity of selling in this sector as Cairn got out of the index. FIIs bought ONGC but bought Cairn and Reliance.
Do the domestic mutual funds agree with their global counterparts? I am afraid no. domestic mutual fund portfolio is grossly different from FIIs as they are most bullish on industrials and bearish on telecom and financials where FIIs are positive. In contrast to FIIs, mutual funds here sold Asian Paints, Jubilant Foodworks and L&T. They however held similar views in stocks like Bharti which both bought and ONGC that both sold. Both were also negative about metals and mining sectors.
Top domestic buys: Power Finance Corporation, ICICI Bank, IDBI, ITC, Infosys.
Top sells: L&T, Titan, ONGC, HDFC Bank and Asian Paints.