Equities to perform best among assests: Veterans

Mumbai: Despite the equity markets hovering around their lifetime highs, a majority of investment professionals expects equities to emerge as the best performing asset class in FY18 driven by the government policies and reforms that would support growth and corporate earnings.

A poll conducted by CFA Society, an association of investment professionals and portfolio managers showed that 77 per cent out of 537 respondents were quite bullish on the equity markets whereas only 7 per cent favoured corporate bonds over other asset classes while just less than 2 per cent expects gold to do well in the current fiscal.

On Wednesday, the 30-share BSE Sensex scaled above the psychological 30K level mark in the intra-day before ending the day at 29,974.24, just 50 points away from its all time high of 30,024.74 touched in March 2015.

Meanwhile the broader 50-share Nifty hit a new high of 9,273.90 in the intra-day and closed the session at 9,265.15.

While 40.42 per cent of the respondents expect the BSE Sensex to trade in the range of 30,000 – 32,000 levels, 25 per cent believes that the index would scale above 32K level mark by the end of March 31, 2018 on hopes that the corporate earnings growth would recover and hit double digit number (10-15 per cent) from single digit growth at the moment.  

Interestingly, only 10 per cent  of the respondents are expecting a steep correction that would drag the Sensex below 26,000 levels.