Jain, Pande are BS Fund Managers of the Year

Prashant Jain, chief investment officer & executive director of HDFC Mutual Fund, and Chaitanya Pande, head – fixed income, ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company, are the Business Standard Fund Managers of the Year.

While Jain was the best fund manager in the equity category, Pande was the chosen one for debt, for their spectacular performance during the year ended March 31, 2011.

The winners were chosen by a four-member jury headed by Ravi Narain, managing director and chief executive officer of the National Stock Exchange. The other members were: Pradip Shah, chairman, IndAsia Fund Advisors; Vibhav Kapoor, group chief investment officer, IL&FS; and Ashvin Parekh, partner, national leader-global financial services, Ernst & Young.

For Jain, the key criterion for his decision on investments is the sustainability of a business. “If a business is competitive, even if you pay a slightly higher price you can make money over time,” Jain said.

Pande’s investment philosophy revolves around ICICI Pru’s own version of SLR — safety, liquidity and returns, in that order. “If you manage the first two well, returns will come,” Pande said. For the equity category, only open-ended diversified funds, whether large-cap or mid-cap, were considered. Sector or theme funds were not eligible. In the debt category, only the long-term funds were considered. Interestingly, the Adjusted Sharpe ratio — which measures the return for every unit of risk taken across all the schemes managed by a fund manager — of both the winning fund managers was way ahead of the rest, reflecting their superior risk-adjusted returns.

The jury members analysed data as well as the parameters used to rank the fund managers. They worked on and compared key ratios like the Adjusted Sharpe ratio and the standard deviation to analyse the performance of the fund managers. A composite score was ascertained for each fund manager, based on data provided by ICRAOnline.