Manager Biography And Fund Strategy

Vinit Sambre has been managing DSP Small Cap since June 2010. He is a competent analyst with reasonable portfolio management experience. Sambre has executed his strategy with a good degree of success over the years.

He combines absolute and relative valuation measures when picking stocks in the small-cap space. He scouts for companies that have sustainable competitive advantages over peers. He meets the company’s management regularly and tracks their decisions. Sambra invests only when he is comfortable with the management’s assumptions, forecasts, and capabilities. Sambre is valuation-conscious but does not mind paying a premium for a company if it satisfies all his investment criteria. He looks at quantitative parameters such as ROE, ROCE, P/E and P/BV vis-a-vis a company’s intrinsic growth prospects. He also invests a portion of the portfolio in firms trading well below their book values, which constitute his value picks. He looks for companies affected by poor market conditions and macroeconomic scenarios rather than from deteriorating fundamentals. The top-down approach is sometimes used to increase exposure in sectors looking attractive on valuations and future outlook. Given the bias for small-cap stocks, Sambre adopts a buy-and-hold approach when constructing the portfolio.

The small and mid-cap allocations together comprise almost 100 per cent of the portfolio compared with the small-cap Morningstar Category average of 80 per cent. Even as he prefers a diversified portfolio, he ensures his high-conviction investments have a good representation in the fund.