The ugly, the bad and the good

Fund-management legend Samir Arora is back in India and he has advice for us on how to choose stocks and spouses

- DHIRENDRA KUMAR

A few days ago, I had an interesting chat with Samir Arora, who is the co-founder of Helios Capital Management. The firm is in the process of setting up a new mutual fund company in India and expects to launch its first funds in six to eight months. However, mutual funds are not a topic for this magazine, so let's leave that for Value Research Online and 'Mutual Fund Insight'.

I'm here to talk about what we investors can learn from Samir Arora's equity investing. Arora has a long and illustrious history as an equity fund manager and I consider his approach to stock picking and the general philosophy of equity investing to be of tremendous interest to all equity investors.

During the 1990s, right at the dawn of the modern, post-liberalisation mutual fund industry in India, Arora was the Chief Investment Officer of Alliance Mutual Funds in India. The performance of his equity funds was phenomenal and went a long way in establishing the attractiveness of Indian equity in the minds of a new generation of investors. Alliance later sold its India business to what was then Birla Sun Life AMC. Arora shifted base to Singapore and started his own hedge-fund business named Helios, which invested in Indian equities. Now, Helios is starting an Indian arm.

A video of my chat with Arora will soon be up on Value Research Online but let me tell you something that really struck me as worth emulating for equity investors, and that's the way Arora classifies the universe of investable stocks and the broad approach he has.