The world will reorient towards non-tech sectors like finance: Raamdeo Agrawal

It has been a tough year overall for investors who have to deal with falls, a great deal of volatility and uncertainty overall. However, if one had stayed put through all of it, one hasn’t done too badly as compared to investors around the world. Indeed. India has been the best performing large market this year. CNBC-TV18 spoke to veteran investors — Raamdeo Agrawal, Chairaman and Co-founder of Motilal Oswal Financial Services and Manish Chokhani, Director at Enam Holdings — to discuss what next for the market?

The big story last year was to sell IT and buy financials. And that worked out well. On what the big story would be from this Samvat to the next, Agrawal said that it is a cycle.  "There was a Y2K boom in 2000, when the technology sector came into the forefront for the first time. There was a tech boom, and then it collapsed. People went to financials. There was a global financial crisis in 2008. So people said even finance is bad, so let's rediscover tech. The tech came in the form of digital, online marketing and all that," he said.

Agrawal said that in the next three to five years the world will again reorient towards the non-tech industry. According to him, finance is a very large sector, bigger than tech and that's a good place to park oneself.

“All the banks are clean. The books have been doubly tested, and COVID-19 was a mother of all the tests. So there is nothing left to be written off. In fact everybody's writing back, you are seeing all the results. So I think we have a very good - and you have to lend for three, four years. You have to first start bad lending. That is a three, four year cycle. My sense is that finance is the place to be," he added.

Reiterating the same, Chokani  said that finance is a large field. “Finance is such a large field. In the last two, three years if you didn't make money in HDFC Bank or a Kotak Mahindra Bank and you made it in ICICI Bank and Axis Bank or State Bank of India (SBI), it may be because right now, everyone's so worried about HDFC Bank and the merger, it may be the biggest stock which is going to give you the best return,” he explained.

According to Agrawal, the real estate sector is coming out of the slumber after 13-14 years. “It has just picked up in the last 12 months. The stocks have picked up a lot. The sector still has a runway and it is just coming out of a slumber," he said.