Outlook 2016: Vikas Gupta, Arth Veda Capital

Vikas Gupta is Chief Investment Officer at Arth Veda Capital.

What were the major themes of your business in 2015? 

For ArthVeda Capital, the major theme was the launch of our Smart Alpha Index Family. Smart Alpha is a rules-based, value investing framework that produces a portfolio of low risk, high quality stocks that are available at a discount to intrinsic value. We worked with the New York Stock Exchange to launch a suite of Smart Alpha Indexes that provide comprehensive coverage of all listed equities across Smart Value, Smart Income and Smart Alpha styles. These styles are our value-oriented alternatives to the conventional equity style box. In addition, we were also focused on managing portfolios on advisory and sub-advisory basis for the ultra-high net-worth individuals and institutions.

Vikas Gupta,
Arth Veda Capital

What are your expectations for 2016?

We have been in discussion with several of the larger exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers to launch Smart Alpha products in the U.S.  Given the highly differentiated nature of the Smart Alpha indexes, we are also getting interest from other arenas including options and futures, UITs, closed-ended funds, exchange-traded notes, and managed accounts. The last three to five years were the years of Smart Beta. In 2016, we expect to take the ETF community beyond Smart Beta and back to the Graham and Buffett style of fundamentally-oriented value investing. Furthermore, we will also be focusing on winning more domestic and global investment mandates, either as index providers or on an advisory or sub-advisory basis. The funds will be managed across a mix of weighted ETFs, UCITS (for non-US investors) and separately managed accounts and we expect to continue our top performance in the hedge fund space using our Smart Alpha Framework.