Anoop Bhaskar quits UTI MF

Anoop Bhaskar (48), who is considered a star fund manager in the mutual fund sector, has quit UTI Asset Management Company. As head of equity, Bhaskar has been responsible for managing the fund house's equity assets since 2007.

Confirming Bhaskar's resignation, a UTI spokesperson said, "The schemes handled directly by Anoop Bhaskar are being re-allocated to other experienced fund managers and will remain unaffected, pursuant to Bhaskar's desire to move on. The re-allocation of portfolios will be intimated in due course."

Business Standard could not ascertain where Bhaskar is headed or if he is leaving the fund management sector altogether.

The other high-profile fund managers who left the sector in recent years are Franklin Templeton's Sivasubramanian K N and IDFC MF's Kenneth Andrade.

Bhaskar, a graduate from Delhi University and an MBA in Finance from Symbiosis - Pune, has 23 years of experience in equity research and fund management. Prior to joining UTI AMC, he was with Sundaram Asset Management. Before that, he had worked at Templeton Asset Management as a senior research analyst.

Before joining UTI, Bhaskar had given fabulous returns to investors in Sundaram Select Midcap Fund. Between 2003 and 2007, the fund outperformed the benchmark by a massive 17 percentage points as his fund grew 61 per cent annually. The performance of one of his current schemes - UTI Mid Cap - has done as well. In the past three years, it grew at 30 per cent a year against the benchmark gaining 16 per cent.

Some of the other schemes that Bhaskar manages include UTI Equity Fund, UTI Opportunities Fund and UTI Transport & Logistics. Put together, he looks after assets worth Rs 14,500 crore.

It is interesting to note his stint at UTI started when the current Securities and Exchange Board of India chairman U K Sinha was the head of UTI Mutual Fund.

Bhaskar's peers hold him high. They say he is one of the few fund managers in India with an 'eagle eye' to target his stock pick. "He is unbeatable in his vision and has established himself as someone a young fund manager aspires to learn from," says the chief investment officer of a rival fund company.

Amid robust flows in equity schemes for the past two years despite corrections in the markets, he was the first one to flag off concerns of equity mutual fund flows if the markets did not perform according to expectations. In an interview to Business Standard after the August correction, Bhaskar had said, "To some extent, the faith in equities hasn't been shaken. As this was the first correction in this market, people generally are more confident. The real test will come when you have another correction, deeper than the first one. If there are more months of decline, this hypothesis will be tested."