Market veteran Pashupati Advani remains cautious about the current market rally, telling ET Now he is "watching the market go up and hoping for yet another dip" because fundamental uncertainties driving the sell-off have not been resolved. According to The Economic Times, Advani, the founder of Global Foray, cited the Strait of Hormuz closure as a key concern, stating "We are getting oil from the other side of the straits and we are getting LNG from the other side of the straits. Do we know if the Strait of Hormuz is open or closed? I do not know. It is a guess." The rupee's behavior is also telling him something uncomfortable, after briefly strengthening to 84 against the dollar, it has slipped back, signaling the market has not priced in a clean resolution to the supply disruption.
Advani pointed to a tangible supply squeeze playing out in India's LPG market, with consumers reportedly being restricted to one cylinder per month, with rebooking only permitted 25 days after the previous cylinder arrives. As reported by The Economic Times, he noted "LPG cylinders are quite hard to find. We are managing at home in a large city like Bombay, but restaurants are having a lot of difficulty." His bigger worry is rural and northern India, where an LPG shortage has historically pushed households back to burning wood, creating both environmental and social pressure through the summer. The supply constraints are already affecting daily life, with restaurants experiencing significant difficulties in obtaining LPG cylinders.
On the corporate earnings front, Advani was blunt about the conflict's impact, stating the conflict began at the end of February and has now consumed two full months — months that straddle two financial years, which softens the accounting blow slightly but does not change the operational reality for companies dependent on imports. According to The Economic Times, he said "Two full months taken out of a company's earnings is a lot. Anyone dependent on anything coming from overseas is in some difficult state." This extended period has created significant disruption for companies with international supply chains and import-dependent operations.
Advani reserved his sharpest observations for India's IT sector, which he described as being caught between three simultaneous headwinds. The first challenge is the H-1B visa squeeze, with the US issuing new visas selectively and at steep cost, undercutting the model Indian IT firms built around deploying talent on-site at American clients. Second, AI adoption, where Advani believes Indian IT companies are scrambling to reposition but none have convincingly succeeded yet. Third, and most concerningly for the broader economy, job market stagnation, with Advani warning that net hiring across major Indian IT companies may have been close to zero last year — compared to historical norms of 25,000 to 30,000 per company annually for large players. As reported by The Economic Times, he warned "For them to be basically net zero is not cool. That is going to have a lot of knock-on effect — defaults on loans, housing loans, white goods loans. Not today, but six months to a year down the road."
Despite his cautious stance, Advani's one area of relative optimism is old-economy infrastructure plays. According to The Economic Times, he argued that cement and steel companies continue to benefit from government contract flow on roads, housing, and urban infrastructure projects, citing Mumbai's Coastal Road as an example. However, even in these sectors, power costs have surged, and both cement and steel are energy-intensive industries, with the war's knock-on effects on power pricing beginning to squeeze margins even in sectors that looked insulated. The net picture Advani paints is one of a market caught between genuine structural opportunities and near-term shocks that have not yet fully worked their way through corporate earnings or household balance sheets.
