Next two-three quarters will be a good time for investment and investors could earn strong returns if they hold their investments and withstand the volatility, said Harsha Upadhyaya, CIO-equity, Kotak Mutual Fund. “In the very short-term, the market is going to be consolidating at around current levels. Ongoing earning season is unlikely to give positive triggers for an upward move in the market," he said.

Share Market Live

NSE

On IT and pharmaceutical sectors, he said Kotak MF positioned themselves defensive but it may not be in the traditional defensive sectors. "Traditionally, people think that IT, pharma, FMCG are some of the defensive sectors. While the businesses may remain defensive, we don’t think that the stock prices at this point in time are defensive in some of these because of the concerns on the valuations or on the regulatory side that you have in pharma.”

The current ongoing freeze in debt markets is unlikely to affect any of the companies in Kotak MF's portfolio, he said.

Within the IT sector, Upadhyaya said he is avoiding midcap IT stocks at this time because, from a valuation perspective, they are as rich as large-cap companies or maybe even richer. "At the same time, the headwinds are going to be much more for some of the midcap companies, so we are going to be very stock specific in IT sector going forward,” he further mentioned.

In terms of Nifty, he said, “This year itself we would have seen maybe more than 20 percent kind of an earnings growth for Nifty basket. Once the economy is in full swing, I think there is going to be much better valuation support for equities and that is where equity investors from a longer-term perspective will make more money than other asset classes in our opinion.”