Sensex Today | Stock Market Live Updates: Nifty tops 24,350; ₹14 lakh crore added this week

Sudip Bandopadhyay Market Expert

On Groww

“We have been liking Groww, that is one company where we believe there is significant potential for growth in revenue as well as margins. They have the largest number of customers on their broking side of the business, and the potential for using the same customer base to provide other services like mutual fund distribution, insurance, wealth management, loan against shares. All this margin funding, all this is significant. We believe there is significant scale up possible in Groww, and that should be picked up from a long-term perspective.”

On MCX

“As far as asset management companies are concerned, it’s a long-term growth story. These corrections, which we have seen in the recent past, can be a good opportunity for picking up or building long-term portfolio, but these are not cheap, and don’t expect miracles in the short term from these stocks.
The other segment, which we definitely like, in spite of the high valuation, is exchanges. MCX, for obvious reasons, what’s happening in the commodities, commodity options coming into play. So MCX, in spite of the valuation, is a favourite. BSE continues to remain a favourite and also the upcoming NSE listing should add a lot of payment to BSE stock, both in terms of valuation pickup and also, in terms of NSE, will start trading in BSE, which will create a lot of excitement around BSE as far as creating volumes are concerned. If I have to pick one I will go for still MCX.”

Alok Agarwal, Head of Quant & Fund Manager, Alchemy Capital Management

On MCX
“Let me put it this way—MCX and BSE are both plays on capital markets, and MCX indirectly is also a play on the metal side, which is our top sectoral bet. If we look at the last decade, India, which is a savers’ economy, saw the majority of savings being channelled through bank deposits. Banks made use of those low-cost deposits to earn higher net interest margins, and we saw how banks delivered great returns in the last decade. Fast forward to the post-COVID era, we realise that most savers are channelling money more towards capital markets. We see that banks are witnessing lower deposit growth, whereas SIP numbers are rising. So the amount in capital markets is only going up. Financialisation of savings is picking up.

The natural beneficiary is the capital market plays. Within that, the pecking order in terms of those who have a larger and longer hold on investors is: first the exchanges, followed by wealth managers, and then asset managers. We are playing that cycle. We do think we are still in the middle or early-middle phase of that cycle. A larger part of that migration is still pending, and we do see significant growth coming in. Within the sector, since it is consumer-facing, our preference is for exchanges that gain market share. We saw how BSE, with less than 1% market share in options, has now moved north of 20%. MCX happens to be one of the monopolies on the commodity side—whether it is gold, silver, or crude—so that also helps it grow faster than the segment.”