Market outlook looks good: Prateek Agarwal, Bharti AXA Invest Manager

Prateek Agarwal, Head Equities, Bharti AXA Invest Manager, in a chat with ET Now talks about the markets, economy and quarterly results.

What will finally be the overall direction of liquidity flows and perhaps global markets? How do you think that this thing is going to pan out in terms of just news flow, global flows and thought flows and then can we have your view on specific local markets?

In terms of news flow, the Greece downgrade is already in the news now. So in the immediate term, from Europe you will probably not get negative news. If at all, one may hope to get something positive as regards to other economies - may be stress in terms of a package or something. So that is one.

Second, in terms of Indian economy, all the numbers that came in - except for inflation - looked reasonably good. The state of the government finances has looked significantly better than what was presented in the Budget. So overall, it is pretty good in terms of data momentum. Going forward, the first quarter numbers are expected to be good on a Y-o-Y basis from industries and for a very large part of the index. Banking should stand out after Q4. Q1 did not see the kind of dips in lending, in credit offtake that we usually see. So clearly on a Y-o-Y basis, banks should do well. The yields have come down a bit, so the overall outlook for the markets are looking good.

Yes, we are very close to the range wherein markets have retraced over the past two times but given this kind of an outlook, chances of us breaching that this time around is high. So we would want to believe that this time around we would breach that range.