Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies has launched a dedicated India long-only equity portfolio with 16 stocks. In its weekly note, GREED & fear, Wood stated that the Indian portfolio will start with 16 stocks compared with the 21 stocks currently in the Asia ex-Japan long-only portfolio.

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These include the likes of ICICI Bank, HDFC, Bajaj Finance, Reliance Industries (RIL), ONGC, Maruti Suzuki India, Tata Steel, and Jubilant FoodWorks, among others.

India has nearly always had a significant representation in GREED & fear’s long-only Asia ex-Japan portfolio, launched nearly 19 years ago at the end of the third quarter of FY02 but the India specific portfolio will be launched for the first time, observed the report.

In his previous report, Wood said that he remains overweight on Indian markets and has further raised its weight by two percentage points to 14 percent in its portfolio. He also advised investors who missed the surge should take advantage of any significant pullback in private sector banks.

However, it noted that this is not the perfect time for such a portfolio since the Indian markets are trading near record-high levels.

"Still GREED & fear remains convinced that India is at the start of a new housing cycle after a seven-year downturn, after the mother of all consolidations in the developer industry, which is why there will be a 17 percent weight in the property sector,” Wood said.

The report further shared that this portfolio will be domestic demand focused, though it will have a decent energy weighting to hedge, in part at least, the obvious risk of a higher oil price on Indian financials and other interest rate-sensitive sectors.

Meanwhile, regarding the existing portfolio, Wood informed that the Asia ex-Japan long-only thematic portfolio has risen on a total-return basis by 3,266 percent in US-dollar terms since inception at the end of Q3-2002, compared with a 746 percent increase in the MSCI AC Asia ex-Japan Index and a 669 percent increase in the S&P500.