Finding Friends in Trends!!

I have always been a Bottom-Up investor all through my investing life (of 4.5 years). So much that, however hard a friend may try to convince me to buy a stock on story/macro, I will not even bother to study the stock, if numbers don't look convincing enough.

However, since last few months I have started to look at big level macro themes & trends. Whether that is because of getting more experienced & hence more intelligent OR desperation as Bull market makes more in-roads OR me getting more closer to noise thanks to twitter & whatsapp OR due to macro trends more visible thanks to Mr Modi's marketing skills, I am not too sure.

Some of the trends that are attracting market participants these days are -

• Affordable housing and Housing for All

• 100 smart cities

• More toilets

• Revival of CV industry

• Growth of Solar & Wind

• Humongous opportunity for Indian Pharma

• Textiles - The Next Pharma  

• E-com Boom

• Growth of Commodity trading in India

• Make- in- India

• Growth of QSR Industry in India

• Digitization

Though stocks are still not finding place in my portfolio just on these trends, however, when trends meet numbers, I am getting more & more inclined to look deeper.

And a result of that, have found a few friends in the above trends.

Now whether these trends become destiny (& give me multi-baggers) or fade away (& give me multi-beggers), we will only get to know in due course!!!

Some of the ANTI-TRENDS that are quite prevalent these days are-

• Rural growth struggling

• Offline retailing struggling 

Both look over-hyped to me. 

Rural struggled last year due to poor monsoon. This year I expect this trend to reverse due to better monsoon, increase of MSP in few crops, more focus on MGNREGA and last year's low base.

People don't buy non-branded apparels online, especially in Tier-2 and 3 cities.

Hence, I still continue to have a few friends in these Anti-trends and I remain bullish on their long term performance.