The NFO period for WhiteOak mid-cap and the tax-saver fund is live now; the equity fund manager of both the offerings shared insights about how they intend to deploy investor’s funds in the schemes.
WhiteOak Capital Mutual Fund has launched two new fund offerings: WhiteOak Capital Mid Cap Fund and WhiteOak Capital Tax Saver Fund. The NFO for the mid-cap fund is open from August 16-30, while subscriptions for the tax saver fund will run from August 16 to September 23. The minimum subscription amount for both schemes is Rs 500 for both SIP and lump sum.
WhiteOak Mid-Cap Fund
The fund will invest 65 per cent of the portfolio in mid-cap stocks, and the remaining 35 per cent will be split between large-cap stocks and small-cap stocks. The fund will be benchmarked against S&P BSE Midcap 150 TRI. It will be managed by Ramesh Mantri for the equity section, Piyush Baranwal for the debt section, and Trupti Agarwal for the overseas section.
According to Mantri, the fund will take overseas positions (when the limit is lifted off) in companies with a predominant Indian base but are listed overseas, not purely overseas companies with Indian operations. Also, another interesting feature would be that there would be no lump sum offer for the mid-cap fund post the NFO close date. However, one can invest in this through a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) and Systematic Transfer Plan (STP) post NFO closure.
The fund will follow a bottom-up stock selection approach. “We consciously seek to maintain a balanced portfolio reflecting our team’s stock selection capabilities rather than being driven by non-stock specific macro factors, such as market timing, sector, currency, or other such factor exposures,” says Mantri.
Mantri presented an infographic showing that some styles of investing did not generate much return during certain years, whereas during certain times, they did work. The same infographic showed that in the calendar years 2018, 2019, and 2020, the “value-style of investing under-performed before their comeback in CY 2021.” Giving another example, he said, “During CY2018 and CY2020, the quality-style of investing worked well, but they did poorly during CY 2017 and CY 2019.”
He further added that “sectors like IT services and pharma were among the worst performers during CY 2016 and 2017, compared to the broader market, but subsequently, the IT services outperformed most of the sectors in CY 2018, CY 2020 and 2021, and pharma outperformed in CY 2020.”
WhiteOak Tax Saver
Aashish Somaiyaa, CEO, WhiteOak Capital Mutual Fund, said, “After the launch of the Flexi-cap fund, which garnered significant interest across the country and globally, the mid-cap and tax-saver funds are again retail-centric equity offerings.”
This specific tax-saver fund will be benchmarked against S&P BSE 500 TRI. Prateek Pant, chief business officer at White Oak Capital Management, said that the tax-saver fund is similar to their Flexi-cap fund and will follow a blend of value and growth investing style and “will have no style bias.” He added that the portfolio will be balanced “consisting of pro-cyclical and counter-cyclical stocks to help reduce macroeconomic shocks, and forensic teams will help identify the negative list of stocks.” He further said the scheme is free to invest in companies across varied market capitalisation.