Foreign investment flows into Indian markets are a fraction of their potential as most have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the markets to correct and valuations to cool down, said Pratik Gupta, CEO and co-head, Kotak Institutional Equities.

“Global investors have been on the sidelines..whatever money we have seen flowing in, is a trickle, compared to what they can invest,” Gupta told businessline. A lot of foreign money was still outside, waiting for Indian markets to correct. Foreign investors had sold India and invested in the US or other markets, thinking that they would return to India once the markets had moderated to more reasonable valuations.

The Indian markets were expensive and there was a lot of froth in some segments such as micro caps and small caps, Gupta said.

“The market is expensive with the NIFTY trading at 23x one-year forward earnings”.  While valuations looked expensive in the short term from a 3-5 year horizon equities would still offer better returns than fixed income, he explained.

Foreign portfolio investors have invested Rs 91,708 crore so far this year in Indian equities, being net buyers in some months and net sellers in others. In 2023 they had invested Rs 1.7 lakh crore, according to data from NSDL.

Gupta said that many global funds, who had thought India was expensive earlier, were left feeling left out as the markets continued to rally with money coming in from retail and domestic institutions. “Retail and domestic institutional investors are turning out to be far more resilient,” Gupta. He pointed out that this was one of the reasons that IPOs, QIPs and block deals were seeing so much interest from foreign investors as they were coming in through that route.

Neither the election outcome nor the increase in capital gains tax has dampened  the Indian stock market’s sentiments.

According to Gupta, foreign flows could be segregated into several buckets. There were the sovereign wealth funds, the passive index tracking funds, global equity funds, and then there were the global emerging markets funds who were not seeing fresh inflows because their end-investors were still betting on the US markets and feeling that they need not invest in emerging markets. 

There were the India dedicated funds, forming 10-15 per cent of the total foreign flows, which were also seeing good funds flow.

Hedge funds and quant funds were keen to invest in India, but regulatory restrictions prevented them from taking large exposures.

The rate cuts in the US is one of the triggers for higher FPI inflows, Gupta said, adding that more money would come into emerging markets and India would be one of the beneficiaries. 

Some of the sectors attracting institutional investors were consumer sector with expectations of a revival in the rural economy now that the monsoon has been good, private sector banks, and in infrastructure stocks.

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