Personal Finance: Superscrips: My Cousin Mutual

Especially since it is he who seems to drive our stockmarkets--up or down the street, as may be his whim--with the Rs 100,000 crore at his disposal.

While imitation may be the worst form of investment strategy, I still find it fascinating to track which scrip is, and which isn't, catching the fancy of the mutual funds. Which then allows me to double-guess their logic in a given stockmarket and, of course, sit in personal judgement on them.

Since most of the fund managers I know make it a point to periodically disclose their portfolios, I decided to dig through my database last week to check the net positions of the holdings of 30 mutual funds on the two days in the last quarter on which they disclosed them. That is, on September 30 and December 31, 1997.

As you can make out from the tables below, I then analysed the variations in their portfolio positions, which reflects the opinion of these fund managers on sectors and companies in a volatile stockmarket.

What did I find out that was, like, different? Well, that banking and consumer non-durable scrips were among their favourite buys in the fourth quarter of 1997. In addition, fund managers seem to favour liquid blue-chip stocks.

One interesting inclusion in their portfolios, after its Initial Public Offering in October, 1997, was the Corporation Bank (trading price: Rs 125 on the Bombay Stock Exchange on March 6, 1998). At least six funds had it.

As for sells, the quarter was marked by an exodus from infotech stocks, mainly Satyam Computers (Rs 194.10) and Infosys (Rs 1,376.50). Moreover, most of the funds continued to get out of cyclical stocks, such as Indo Gulf Fertilisers (Rs 34.45) and Gujarat Ambuja Cements (Rs 269.40).

Interestingly, while 11 of them shed the largest bank stock, the State Bank of India (Rs 272.50), from their portfolios, they also displayed a distaste for two popular public sector scrips: the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (Rs 261.20), and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (Rs 456).

So, there they are: the picks and the plucks of the mutual fund manager. Follow him, but at your own peril. Don't forget, he's bigger than you are.

PORTFOLIO PORTRAIT OF A COUSIN
	No. of	No. of
	schemes	shares
BUYS
Corporation Bank	6	1,71,000
Reliance Industries	6	48,890
Punjab Tractors	5	8,400
Knoll Pharmaceuticals	5	3,000
ITC	4	52,900
Pfizer	4	42,300
Cochin Refineries	4	35,400
Castrol India	4	28,650
SmithKline Beecham Pharma	4	19,000
Pond's (India)	4	4,250
Hdfc Bank	3	58,250
Wipro	3	34,200
Niit	3	19,700
Asea Brown Boveri	3	7,450
Hoechst Marion Roussel	2	16,900
Procter & Gamble India	2	8,300
Reckitt & Colman of India	2	6,250
Sundaram Clayton	2	3,500
SELLS
State Bank of India	11	1,03,293
Hindustan Petroleum	11	43,300
Infosys Technologies	9	89,800
Mahanagar Telephone Nigam	8	1,25,000
Satyam Computer Services	5	2,76,830
TELCO	3	65,000
Cabot India	2	47,300
Glaxo India	2	35,153