The new fund offer is currently open and closes on February 20. The fund will be benchmarked to the Nifty Energy TR Index and managed by Raj Gandhi and Pradeep Kesavan. The minimum investment in the fund is ₹5,000. The fund will have an exit load of 1% if units are redeemed a year before allotment.
The fund manager will use a barbell approach for building the portfolio with a mix of traditional energy and new energy companies. The scheme will have a portfolio of around 20-25 stocks, of the 90 companies available in the energy space. The portfolio could be concentrated and will include companies from the oil, gas, power, power ancillaries and green energy space.
Fund managers believe valuations are reasonable in energy space with the Nifty Energy Index trading at a trailing PE of 15.6x, a discount of 25% to Nifty 50 TRI. Over long and short term, the Nifty Energy TRI has outperformed the Nifty 50. Over a 3-year period Nifty Energy TRI returned 28.22% compared to Nifty 50’s 17.34%. Over a 10-year period, the Nifty Energy TRI has returned 17.9% compared to Nifty 50 return of 14.72%.
Analysts believe there is a long runway for growth in the energy space given the largest global energy company Saudi Aramco has a market cap of $2048.7 billion and is 4.6xof the entire Nifty Energy Index. The weight of the energy sector fell from 24.86% in December 2004 to 6.75% in December 2023 in the S&P BSE 200. A note by SBI MF points out that the sector is under-represented in the index because of issues with profit pool and valuations assigned to the available profit pool.”The government is making a number of policy reforms in the traditional energy space and encouraging investments in the green energy space, which makes this sector attractive from a 3-5 year time frame,” said S Shankar, certified financial planner, Credo Capital. However, being a sectoral fund, wealth managers believe not everyone should invest here.