Anil Sarin of Centrum PMS says India has always been an expensive market, but this is justified due to attractive historical stock returns and higher earnings growth.

One has to look at mid-cap and small-cap space individually, instead of focusing on headline valuation, says Anil Sarin of Centrum PMS as many sectors and segments are in a growth phase and their valuations still appears favourable compared to their medium-term earnings growth potential.

The Chief Investment Officer at Centrum PMS with over 25 years of rich experience in fund management expects overall private capex to be strong over next 2-3 years, due to rising/peaking capacity utilisations, improving demand visibility and comfortable balance sheets.

He believes India offers higher growth than other emerging markets (EMs) and therefore current valuations don’t seem to be very alarming to us. On the valuations front, the Nifty is trading at forward PE Of 20.6x which is roughly 0.5 standard deviations above mean.