Contrarian investing rests on a simple premise: markets overreact, sentiment swings further than fundamentals justify, and the biggest gains often go to those willing to hold positions everyone else has abandoned. In practice this is far harder than it sounds: a "neglected sector" can stay neglected for years, a value thesis can be wrong rather than early, and discipline that looks prescient in hindsight requires tolerating long stretches of being out of step with the market. Applying this at scale, across one of India's largest pools of investor capital, and doing so consistently through multiple market cycles (2008, the 2013 taper tantrum, 2020, and beyond) raises further questions: how to size conviction bets, when a contrarian view is genuinely mispriced risk versus a value trap, and how to manage the behavioural gap between what investors say their time horizon is and how they actually behave when markets fall. This session examines how these questions play out in practice, drawing on decades of navigating Indian equity and debt markets through cycles of euphoria and panic.
About the Speaker
S Naren is Executive Director and Chief Investment Officer at ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company, one of India's largest mutual fund houses, which he joined in October 2004. He is widely regarded as one of India's most influential fund managers and a leading practitioner of contrarian, value-oriented investing - identifying neglected themes and sectors ahead of the market and holding positions through full cycles until they are re-rated. He manages several of ICICI Prudential's flagship schemes, including the Value Discovery Fund, and has built a reputation for combining top-down macro judgement with bottom-up stock selection, and for the discipline to act against prevailing sentiment when valuations demand it.
The event will be held in a hybrid format; however, in-person attendance is strongly encouraged to participate in the discussion. Registration is mandatory.
