Concentrated portfolio of bank ETFs under Sebi lens

To look at diversification risk from bank ETFs investing in stocks of banking indices

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is looking at the diversification risk from bank exchange-traded funds (ETFs) investing in stocks of the banking indices of the two major bourses.

Of a total of 12 banking scrips in the National Stock Exchange's Nifty Bank index, three — HDFC Bank, ICICI and Kotak Mahindra — contribute 45 per cent to the index weight. The bottom five contribute five per cent.

Similarly, for the BSE exchange's Bankex, the top five out of 10 stocks contribute four-fifths to the weight.

These indices are created on a free-float method. Here, the price is multiplied by the number of shares readily available in the market and excludes locked-in shares held by promoters, government, etc.

Under the diversification norms, mutual fund (MF) schemes cannot invest more than 10 per cent in a single stock. However, this rule is not applicable to ETFs, as these mimic the weight of stocks that comprise the ETF basket. While open-ended sectoral funds can reset the weight of a particular stock, ETFs cannot do this. Equity ETFs are passive investment instruments that are based on indices and invest in securities in the same proportion as the underlying index. ETFs have much lower expense ratios compared to MFs.

"Typically, when you construct an ETF, you don't want a large weight sitting somewhere, as it is against the principle of portfolio allocation. The aim should be to get reasonable returns through diversification, not the case with some of the sectoral ETFs in India," said a fund manager, who did not want to be named.

Experts believe a way of getting around this problem is to construct ETFs based on Undertaking in Collective Investments in Transferable Securities (UCITS). This is a regulatory framework of the European Commission that creates a harmonised regime through Europe for the management and sale of MFs.

UCITS funds follow a '5/10/40' rule. A maximum of 10 per cent of a fund's net assets may be invested in securities from a single issuer. Investments of more than five per cent with a single issuer are not to be more than 40 per cent of the whole portfolio. However, in cases where a fund is replicating a stock market or other index, the maximum for an issuer is 20 per cent of net assets.

The other way is to create equal weight indices, instead of the existing free-float ones. Equal weight is a type of weighting that gives the same weight or importance to each stock in a portfolio or index fund.

"Broadbasing the index will lead to better diversification and result in a higher weightage to high growth stocks, both beneficial to investors," said a person with knowledge of how ETFs work.