Next 3 months a window to deploy money aggressively; why George Joseph is buying bank & IT stocks

George Joseph, CEO and CIO of Equity at ASK Investment Managers, has a clear message for investors sitting on the sidelines: the next three months are a window to deploy money aggressively into Indian equities.

"The return potential of the market has increased substantially from current levels," Joseph told ET Now, pointing to the fact that Nifty 50 stocks are down roughly 12% in a single month — meaning investors buying today need just a recovery to previous highs to pocket a 20%-plus return.

A year of warnings, now vindicated

Joseph is not a recent convert to caution. For the past year, ASK had been flagging stretched valuations in the mid and small cap segment to its investors. That call has now played out. What has changed is the other side of the equation — valuations have corrected enough that the same fund manager who was wary a year ago is now turning decisively bullish.


The global backdrop, he notes, remains genuinely fragile. The US is carrying high debt levels, a large fiscal deficit, and a wide current account deficit simultaneously — a combination that has historically pressured currencies. The turbulence playing out globally is, in his reading, the US attempting to find a solution to that deeper structural problem. That fragility does not disappear quickly. But Indian stock prices have now corrected enough to compensate for it.

Two sectors beaten to dust

Among the hardest-hit sectors, Joseph singles out construction and real estate as names that have been, in his words, beaten to dust. Most construction stocks have fallen to microcap status — a striking observation about how severe the damage has been. Yet he is becoming increasingly constructive on both, particularly on high-quality names within real estate.

His reasoning on real estate carries an interesting geopolitical angle. Capital that had been flowing out of India into Dubai property — riding the Middle East real estate boom — may now reverse course as the regional situation deteriorates. At the same time, gold and silver ETF flows have gone parabolic, and Joseph believes that money will eventually rotate out of precious metals and into real estate and equities as the risk environment normalises. Real estate, he argues, offers inflation protection as a hard asset — a theme investors have been playing globally since 2020.

Large private banks: music to his ears as prices fall

On banking, Joseph has been on record for eight to nine months calling large private sector banks attractive. The thesis has not played out as quickly as anticipated, but rather than souring on the sector, he has grown more convicted as prices have fallen further.

Several large private bank names are now trading at five-year low valuations. FII selling and broader market panic have driven prices to levels that Joseph believes have become disconnected from underlying fundamentals. "As the price keeps coming off, it becomes extremely rewarding for our investors to dip in," he said. ASK has been an active buyer through the sell-off.

The IT call: what the market is pricing in will not happen for six years

Perhaps the most pointed of Joseph's views concerns Indian IT services. The market, he argues, is pricing in a dramatic near-term collapse in billing driven by AI replacing human work. His conversation with industry veterans and the founders whose personal wealth ASK manages has led him to a different conclusion entirely: what investors expect to happen in the next six months will not materialise even in six years.

His distinction between IT services and Silicon Valley technology is deliberate. Indian IT companies are not exposed to GPU or chip price cycles. What they are exposed to is enterprise technology adoption — and every wave of that, from cloud migration to digital transformation, has historically expanded the opportunity rather than shrinking it. AI, he believes, follows the same pattern: it makes Indian IT companies more efficient internally while simultaneously creating a new wave of consulting and implementation work as enterprises globally transition to AI-driven infrastructure.

One data point he highlights: India's largest IT bellwether raised guidance last quarter. The stock fell anyway. For Joseph, that disconnect — strong fundamentals, weak price — is precisely the kind of opportunity that defines a buying window.

"We have been a buyer of all largecap IT names in this fall," he said. "Valuations are significantly cheaper."