Helios Capital founder Samir Arora expressed frustration with HDFC Bank, stating he is "running out of patience" with the stock's performance. As reported by ET Now, Arora said he would prefer to see the stock perform on its own before considering fresh buying, stating "I am running out of patience in the sense that you know it's a bit too much to every day see that it is falling or not going up and good market bad market it is there." He clarified that "Broadly we are saying at least for me forget about the Indian mutual fund because they have other benchmarks and other issues I will not buy till it does well on its own as a stock first for some time." The fund continues to hold other banking stocks including State Bank of India, which has been delivering good results, but for fresh investments, the focus is more towards NBFCs and other opportunities.
According to reports from NDTV Profit, Dinshaw Irani of Helios Capital expressed optimism about market recovery, stating that first-quarter (Q1FY27) performance has been much better than expected. As reported by NDTV Profit, Irani believes this strong performance is supporting investor sentiment and bringing foreign institutional investor (FII) flows back into Indian equities. The positive sentiment comes as BSE Sensex was trading 0.80% lower at 77,527 levels, while NSE Nifty50 was trading 0.82% lower at 24,271 levels during the session.
As reported by NDTV Profit, Irani noted that FII flows are returning on the back of the strong Q1 performance, with the better-than-expected earnings helping to delay further foreign selling pressure. According to NDTV Profit, on August 11, FIIs net bought shares worth ₹705.24 crore, while DIIs net sold shares worth ₹411.72 crore. This shift in FII sentiment represents a significant turnaround from previous selling pressure that had impacted Indian equity markets.
According to ET Now, Helios takes a highly selective approach to IPOs, participating in only a small fraction of the issues that come to market. As reported by ET Now, "If there were I don't know maybe 50 IPOs last year we would have done as Helios India maybe five six IPOs. So that way we are particular but the ones we like we want to hustle to get a anchor allocation." However, this selective strategy can make it difficult to receive anchor allocations, with Arora noting "For us because we refuse to buy 70 80 or 90% of the IPOs and are only interested in 10%, we don't even get those 10% easily." He argued that the current IPO allocation system is "effectively a institutional bribing system," while emphasizing that investors should focus on "what happens to stocks after their IPO allocation rather than simply tracking who receives anchor shares."
On artificial intelligence and new-age technology themes, Arora said Helios has some exposure but remains cautious due to high valuations. As reported by ET Now, he cited companies such as Schneider and Hitachi as examples of businesses investors could consider, while noting such investments would remain relatively small positions around 3-4% of the portfolio. Arora highlighted that "Growth is very high valuation is also quite high," adding that "It is still unclear how the market will evolve as AI moves from training to inference." He noted that Helios has been pleased with recent performance of new-age companies, particularly Paytm, Eternal and Aether, all up in the 15-20% range. However, he stressed that the fund does not need to make dramatic portfolio changes every quarter, emphasizing "You don't need to buy completely new things every quarter. You just need an ongoing reinforcement and once in a while also change a stock here or there."
