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After going though quite a few managerial changes in the recent past, HDFC TaxSaver now resides under the wings of manager Roshi Jain. Complementing Jain’s vast experience both as an analyst and as a portfolio manager is a well-resourced and a hugely experienced research team. We therefore assign a Morningstar Analyst Rating of Bronze for the regular and direct share classes.Jain joined the fund house in December 2021 and took over as the lead manager of this fund in January 2022. Over the years, she has emerged as one of the most prominent portfolio managers in the industry. Prior to joining HDFC Mutual Fund, she worked with Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund. She joined Franklin in May 2005 as a research analyst and went on to manage some of its key strategies. The funds managed by her had noteworthy track records. Last year in June 2022, Prashant Jain, CIO at HDFC mutual fund quit the fund house. He was the most seasoned manager in the Indian mutual fund industry and had 30-plus years of fund management experience. We thought highly of him as he made the grade on both expertise and experience. His departure is a big loss to the team. However, on a positive note the fund house has appointed senior fund manager Chirag Setalvad as head of equities and Shobhit Mehrotra as head of fixed income; both report to managing director and CEO Navneet Munot. The team at HDFC is sufficiently resourced with experienced managers and analysts. That said, going ahead we would still like to see stability at the helm when it comes to this fund.Roshi Jain adopts a hands-on approach to research and constructs the fund with a growth-at-a-reasonable-price approach. While she is benchmark-aware, she prefers selecting stocks based on top-down and bottom-up approaches, with the latter being more prominent. High-conviction concentrated exposures will continue to be a part of the investment strategy. Jain is patient with her investments and adopts a long-term approach to investing. That said, she will try to avoid deep-value opportunities and adopt a more moderate approach with respect to exposure towards a specific theme. Her aim is to make outcomes relatively more stable. She has managed funds with a similar approach in the past, and the execution has been noteworthy. Jain is currently positioning the portfolio to benefit from the pick up in India’s capex and infrastructure story. The fund can be expected to underperform when her valuation-conscious approach is out of favour or when economic growth is delayed. Given the fund’s investment strategy and Jain’s style of taking concentrated exposures, the fund can go through bouts of short-term underperformance. However, over the long term, patient investors should be rewarded favorably.
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