Every Indian who has ever played cricket in a colony lane knows the golden rule: whoever owns the bat gets to bat first. It's this universal, slightly unfair logic of gully cricket that Nilesh Shah, managing director of Kotak Mahindra Asset Management, reached for at the NDTV Profit Town Hall to explain portfolio construction.
Asked why small and midcap stocks were outpacing large caps, Shah went straight to cricketing instinct. "Small and mid caps... growth is running at double the pace of large cap," he said, before adding a line that could double as batting advice: "if you don't put enough power in the stroke, you are not going to go to six."
That set up the real question — should investors be fielding an entire XI of Rishabh Pants right now? Pant, after all, built his reputation doing precisely the kind of things coaching manuals warn against: reverse-scooping fast bowlers, charging spinners in Test matches, turning seemingly lost causes into famous wins in England and Australia. It's box-office batting. But Shah wasn't fully sold on an all-Pant top order. "If you are playing gully cricket... might as well have eleven Rishabh Pants," he said. "But if you are playing a real test match, then you need to have your Cheteshwar Pujara and Rahul Dravid... your Bumrah and Prasidh Krishna as well."
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The reference to Dravid was pointed. This is a man nicknamed "The Wall" for a Test career built on leaving balls outside off stump for hours and batting through pain — famously playing on with a broken finger, famously grinding out double centuries while others played the shots. Pujara, in the same mould, once faced 525 balls for a hundred against Australia. Neither would ever open a highlights reel. Both would win you a series. That, Shah suggested, is what a resilient long-term portfolio needs alongside its flashier bets.
Nilesh Shah of Kotak AMC has drawn specific lessons from the cricket field.
Photo Credit: NDTV Profit
He also had a warning about timing your aggression. "You don't pick up Rishabh Pant with a 6, 9, 12 month horizon," he said — because going hard, too early, "may end up meeting with injury," much like Pant's own real-life car accident forced a long lay-off after some of his most fearless cricket. High-growth, high-conviction picks, Shah argued, need a five-to-seven-year runway to actually pay off, not a quarter or two of patience.
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On finding the next breakout sector, Shah again reached for the pitch. Just as a captain reads conditions before deciding whether to bowl seam or spin, he said investors need to read the macro environment before picking their stock. "You will have to find out your Rishabh Pant in the niches in which top-down things are playing out," he said — naming healthcare, CDMO (contract development and manufacturing organisations), diagnostics, and select chemical companies as sectors where both the big-picture trend and the individual stock story were lining up.
Shah wasn't done confessing his own cricketing sins either. Recalling childhood matches, he admitted to using bat-ownership as leverage: "pehla batting mera hai kyonki bat mere pass hai" — I bat first because it's my bat. Every investor, in some sense, starts out as that kid on the street — trying to game a system stacked in someone else's favour. The lesson, as ever, is to grow out of it.
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