If you’re a savvy shopper, you wait for discount seasons during the year to buy that new television, phone, fancy shoes or clothes. You get the same good performance or durability, but for a much lower price. If you look for cheaper prices for good quality while buying a phone and are willing to wait for it, you can do the same thing when you’re buying a stock. That’s a value strategy.
What is it?
The principle of looking for good businesses that are trading cheap is value investing. Theoretically, a stock’s price should reflect the underlying potential in a company. A company’s fundamentals, which are its business strategy, revenue and earnings growth, its management, and so on, determines its true worth or intrinsic value. When the intrinsic value of a company is widely misjudged or not realised by the market, the stock’s price will be below this value. As and when the market realises this potential, the stock’s price will move up. A rerating of a stock (from cheap to good) can reap huge gains.
Stocks can become undervalued for several reasons – if there is an overreaction to bad news, the sector in which the company operates is in disfavour, if the company is just starting to turn around, or just plain market irrationality (it happens!). Investors use a combination of several metrics to judge whether a stock is undervalued – price metrics such as price to earnings, price to book, enterprise value, dividend yield, earnings metrics such as profit margins, return on capital, return on investment, performance metrics such as asset turnover, credit worthiness and so on.
One has to tread the value strategy with caution as a miss can result in value trap. A stock may appear cheap but for good reason. Such a stock may never move up and you may end up with an opportunity loss as your money could have been deployed elsewhere.
How is it important?
Knowing that a fund is a value one will help you understand its performance. First, a value-based strategy will pay off only over a longer period. It takes time for the market to recognise potential and then lift the stock.
Second, if it is a bull market, then value will well underperform. In such a market, there will be a set of favoured stocks or sectors and these run up swiftly. As a result, they will not be cheap and therefore will not be a part of a value fund’s portfolio. For the same reason, during market downtrends, a value fund will keep losses to a minimum. Since it already holds stocks that are down, they will not fall by much when markets fall.
Third, value requires patience and suits moderate risk investors. If you hold a value fund, you should be willing to take temporary bouts of underperformance. For example, those such as HDFC Top 200, UTI Opportunities, ICICI Pru Focused Bluechip have all shown relative underperformance over the past year. This is because sectors and stocks these funds favoured, such as banking, engineering, or industrials were all out of market favour over 2015 and much of 2016. A preference for quality and earnings visibility by the market, which has been in place for years now, sent valuations of FMCG, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, finance companies and so on through the roof. Value funds may not own these stocks as they are seldom cheap. Consequently, they would have posted lower performance figures.
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Wealth Conversations – October 2024
Surprised to not see Birla Snlife Pure Value fund, l&t value fund, Templeton India growth fund, Templeton India equity income fund,,quantum long term equity fund.
Hi Tarun,
As mentioned in the article, we were simply giving a few examples of funds that follow value-based investing. It certainly not an exhaustive list.
Thanks,
Bhavana
Hi
Thanks for your reply. Would you want.to.consider.rating value funds as a separate category – just a suggestion.
Hi Tarun,
I don’t think, at this point, we’d need to segregate funds based on their strategy. For one thing, none of the funds are purely value or purely growth. They are always a mix; the general leaning of the fund is towards a particular strategy. It wouldn’t be right to move them out separately. Secondly, at the end of the day, its the returns and performance that matters. The fund’s strategy is used to explain the performance and understand the potential of returns. It may not be a prudent thing to have a fund that’s actually not doing well at all, but is rated higher just because its been grouped with other value funds and additionally, in a smaller universe of funds.
Regards,
Bhavana
In the blog , it was mentioned about HDFC Top 200. I was invested in it through SIP since 2008.As a layman, earlier the return seemed good, but not so in recent past. Even my FundsIndia expert suggested to switch. Was it a mistake and being invested there would have been better? And why that expert from the same Institution as of here could not suggest me to stay put with the fund citing the reasoning mentioned in this blog.
Hello sir,
Trust your advisor has spoken to you and answered the query you have raised here. This particular blog was only an explanation of what value funds are. The funds mentioned here are examples, and not meant as an indication of what to do with a fund. That action depends on the other funds in your portfolio, your time-frame, how long you have been investing in the fund and so on. Hope your doubt is cleared now.
Thanks,
Bhavana
Surprised to not see Birla Snlife Pure Value fund, l&t value fund, Templeton India growth fund, Templeton India equity income fund,,quantum long term equity fund.
Hi Tarun,
As mentioned in the article, we were simply giving a few examples of funds that follow value-based investing. It certainly not an exhaustive list.
Thanks,
Bhavana
Hi
Thanks for your reply. Would you want.to.consider.rating value funds as a separate category – just a suggestion.
Hi Tarun,
I don’t think, at this point, we’d need to segregate funds based on their strategy. For one thing, none of the funds are purely value or purely growth. They are always a mix; the general leaning of the fund is towards a particular strategy. It wouldn’t be right to move them out separately. Secondly, at the end of the day, its the returns and performance that matters. The fund’s strategy is used to explain the performance and understand the potential of returns. It may not be a prudent thing to have a fund that’s actually not doing well at all, but is rated higher just because its been grouped with other value funds and additionally, in a smaller universe of funds.
Regards,
Bhavana
In the blog , it was mentioned about HDFC Top 200. I was invested in it through SIP since 2008.As a layman, earlier the return seemed good, but not so in recent past. Even my FundsIndia expert suggested to switch. Was it a mistake and being invested there would have been better? And why that expert from the same Institution as of here could not suggest me to stay put with the fund citing the reasoning mentioned in this blog.
Hello sir,
Trust your advisor has spoken to you and answered the query you have raised here. This particular blog was only an explanation of what value funds are. The funds mentioned here are examples, and not meant as an indication of what to do with a fund. That action depends on the other funds in your portfolio, your time-frame, how long you have been investing in the fund and so on. Hope your doubt is cleared now.
Thanks,
Bhavana