India as an investment market

I feel very concerned by markets. The quantitative easing (QE) that we have seen in both Japan and the United States is simply not sustainable. At the beginning of the exercise, the US Federal Reserve had $1 trillion worth of bonds on its balance sheet and now they have got $4.5 trillion. (US Fed chief Janet) Yellen in her latest testimony said that when they start, they won't sell more than $10 billion a month. At that pace, it would be 350 months before they have done everything. So in the current environment, I find it incredibly difficult to be a good investor.

On India as an investment destination? India has an awful lot to do with, unfortunately, not having the option of tearing things down and recreating them. Clean India is a great slogan. India has a great potential and it has the benefit of starting from a relatively low base. In India, we are invested principally in private equities. Secondarily we are invested in equities through a couple of managers who invest throughout Asia and thirdly we have one or two clients who own an India equity ETF. The largest Asia fund in which our clients are invested, 3.5% of the portfolio is in India.

On goals-based investing: To a large extent, goals-based investing is what we all do whether you manage for an institution or you manage money for an individual. What we call goals-based is recognition that individual investors have multiple goals whereas institutions typically have a single goal. NRIs are typically most trading oriented of the investors that we have seen and then would come the overseas Chinese. Then you would have at the other extreme, the Japanese who are very cautious. The challenge for many of the Indian advisors is to make sure that their clients listen to the advise. That fits squarely with what the government is trying to do by moving people away from commissions towards advisory fees in one form or another.