Know Your Fund Manager | Jitendra Sriram, Senior Fund Manager - Equity, Baroda BNP Paribas Mutual Fund

Let's start with your personal story

I am an MBA in finance. Prior to that, I did my engineering in electrical & electronics engineering. I was born in Coimbatore district in the southern state of Tamil Nadu but my father’s central government service in New Delhi meant my entire schooling being in Delhi and exposure to the south was largely restricted to the summer breaks during school vacations. As a result, my fluency in Hindi is definitely better than my fluency in Tamil. Graduation and post-graduation were both from the eastern part of the country and my professional experience has been largely in Mumbai. So, pretty thankful that this exposure to the south, then the north in terms of schooling, then the east in terms of higher education and later the west in terms of work brought me in touch with the diversity of cultures of this great country.

How did you land up in this job?

Equity markets and the investing area has always been a fascination for me. Growing up in a phase where Dr Manmohan Singh had kick started India’s economic liberalization in the early 90s, the advent of foreign investors and the subsequent boom in stock markets towards the mid-90s further ignited my interest towards capital markets. My first job from B-school was with ITC which then boasted of a sizeable financial services business across ITC’s treasury, its various ventures which spanned an NBFC which was eventually sold to ICICI. I had expressed an interest in their stock broking arm and after a few months of induction across various ventures in financial services, I was placed as an analyst in their broking research and thus began my journey in capital markets. Over time I worked with firms such as HSBC Securities & Capital Markets as Director & Head of Research and Deutsche Equities as an analyst. Post spending a good amount of time in sell side research, I was keen to learn the ropes of the investing side. I moved to the fund management side and worked with firms such as HSBC Mutual fund, Max Life Insurance (insurance fund management) and Prabhudas Liladhar (on their portfolio management PMS). I am now working with Baroda BNP Paribas Mutual Fund as a senior fund manager since mid-2022.

Which funds are you currently managing?

I am currently managing the large cap product, manufacturing, and business cycle in pure equity schemes which totals about ₹41bn and aggressive hybrid and multi asset among hybrids which totals about ₹21bn.

What is your investment philosophy and how will you describe your investment strategy?

Overall, our investment philosophy follows the BMV framework. This is basically a triangulation of:

1. Business – The emphasis here is on the resilience of the business – the moat of the business, the growth profile and whether this growth is ahead of market growth to deliver outperformance to our investors and change catalysts –which could be driven by environment, regulations or technology among others or it could be internal like balance sheet or cost initiatives.
   
2. Management - This to our mind is almost a binary filter wherein we need to see an established track record of prudent capital allocation (probably the most important metric), competence in running the business as measured in superiority of returns and governance (fair treatment of minorities being a must). A 360-degree view across buyers (trade), suppliers, peers, transporters, rating agencies, bond market pricing etc usually presents reasonable insights into timely payments, liquidity situation, ethics at honoring contracts etc.
   
   
3. Valuation – India being a growth market, in the trade-off between growth and valuation, a particular investment needs to have a growth ahead of its peers for similar valuations or for a comparable growth profile a valuation at a discount to its peers. We also lay a lot of importance to cash generation focusing more on operating cash flows.
   

By and large we are growth focussed investors.

What gives you the kick while managing other people's money?

I wouldn't really call it a kick because it is a job of huge responsibility to ensure the ship achieves the objective of its passengers (the investors) but yes, the market does give a lot of adrenaline shots with its flight path and every day brings with it new challenges sometimes from the macro (some global event or some local event) and sometimes from the micro (stock specific development like an acquisition or a regulation etc) keeping one always on toes and mentally alert. That makes the job really enjoyable as there is no monotony.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views, and opinions given by experts are their own. These do not represent the views of the Economic Times)