VAR Capital news, thought leadership and industry reports

VAR Capital CEO Vikash Gupta Discusses Bear Market Blues with The National News

The National News spoke with a number of market experts, including Vikash Gupta, about the current market outlook earlier this month. The article explores why investors should remain optimistic despite recession fears and adverse global events, by outlining how today’s economic situation is far less of a threat than both the 2008 global financial crisis ...

VAR Capital Featured in FTAdviser: How to Navigate Your Portfolio Through Inflation

Together with the input of the investment team, Vikash Gupta, CEO and co-founder of VAR Capital, has been discussing the increasing issue of inflation in FTAdviser. The article details the key factors that have contributed to inflation being at multi-decade highs, how businesses and individuals have been impacted and how to position portfolios in order ...

VAR CEO’s appearance on Bloomberg

Our Co-founder and CEO Vikash Gupta spoke to Paul Bagnall @BNNBloomberg to discuss how we advise clients in these turbulent times of high inflation and market volatility. “We are telling our clients to invest in the long-term rather than looking at any short-term volatility” Watch the full interview here to find out more: https://bit.ly/3vqnaGg About ...

MARKET PULSE: INVESTMENT COMMITTEE INSIGHTS

Please click on the link below to find our latest Investment Committee Insights Asset Allocation: • Rising Yields and expectations of higher inflation have led us to amend our asset allocation as detailed below Fixed Income • We have reduced the duration of our bond holdings • We prefer allocating to cash over low-yielding and ...

Market Update- April 2021

The month of March ended with a short-term market correction with the bursting of Archegos Capital Management, a family office in the U.S. Though it was swift and the new month has started on some good notes with the global economic outlook turning positive. The global equity indices hiked by around 3 percent (reported as ...

VAR CAPITAL INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEETING – DECEMBER 2020

How 2020 began and early expectations At the beginning of this year, the key issues dominating the investment world were: Impending US elections – A majority Biden victory could have caused short term volatility in the markets Valuations – Whether the strong momentum sustaining into 2020 because the global equity markets had gone up by ...

VAR CAPITAL INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEETING – SEPTEMBER 2020

Please click on the link below to find our latest report from VAR Investment Committee meeting for Q3, 2020 VAR Investment Committee – September 2020 Short read: Positioning Our core sector exposures continue to be Tech, Consumer Staples, Healthcare, and Utilities The bulk of our bond investments remain Investment Grade and in Developed Markets We ...

Market updates – Q2, 2020

Market Summary Most markets at or close to 3-month highs, with the US in the lead and Europe and the UK slightly lagging Outperformance of momentum and growth has reversed relative to value and cyclicals over the past few days, as business conditions start recovering However, uncertainty around the sustainability of market recovery continues ...

VAR Capital Market Update & 2020 Outlook

VAR Capital recently promoted Valerie Bertumen and Shilpa Nanda to Senior Analysts. They both joined VAR Capital several years ago as Analysts. Valerie joined VAR Capital in 2017 as an Investment Analyst. She holds an honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Warwick. Shilpa joined VAR Capital in 2016 as an Operations Analyst. She ...

Momentum vs. Value

Introduction VAR Capital’s investment strategies can be categorised into one of three buckets, namely: Thematic, Event Driven and Value. In this paper, we discuss an interesting thematic opportunity; “Momentum vs. Value”. Momentum investing involves taking a long position in upward-trending assets. It assumes that recent growth trends will continue in the future. Value investing involves ...

VAR Capital Investment Committee meeting – September 2019

Please click on the link below to find our latest report from VAR Investment Committee meeting for Q3, 2019. VAR Investment Committee – September 2019 Short read: Market Overview: Bonds and Equities have done quite well year to date despite trade war escalations; slowdown in global growth; Brexit uncertainty and endless tweets from President Trump ...

Sharp moves in GBP and VAR Capital views

I am sure you have seen the sharp move in GBP recently. Since the latest high of 1.33 in March 2019, sterling has depreciated against the dollar almost 8.5% to the current 1.215 as the risk of a no-deal Brexit significantly increased. Why this is happening? The market is clearly catching up with the view that hard Brexit ...

VAR Capital Publishes Brexit Update for Clients

Brexit is unique. There is no precedent of a developed economy withdrawing from a trade agreement as major and complex as the European Union. There are many potential issues affecting UK’s financial stability arising from this ongoing process. The political and economic consequences of Brexit in the long run are currently unknown and will depend ...

Brexit – Draft Deal Update

A draft deal has been agreed between the negotiators and the UK Cabinet on Brexit. This is not a trade deal – that will be negotiated during the 21 months long transition period after the Brexit date on 29th March 2019. The current agreement details how Britain will separate from the EU, how much money ...

Vikash Gupta discusses market views in CIO round table

VAR Capital’s Vikash Gupta discusses the firm’s views in the PAM Insight CIO Roundtable on 8th March, 2018. Vikash said that the lack of focus on market risks concerned him. Referring to the market volatility that occurred at the start of February, Mr Gupta said that his research suggested that it was triggered by risk ...

CIO Rajat Sharma’s market view published in Portfolio Adviser

VaR Capital Co-Founder and CIO Rajat Sharma shares his views on the markets with the editor of Portfolio Adviser magazine in June 2017. Rajat confirmed that his team is currently in the “wait and watch” mode in the low risk portfolios. The portfolios are overweight cash, defensive and “event names” in equities, which are usually ...

STEP Benchmarking report – VAR Capital performance

VAR Capital’s performance is benchmarked by STEP, the Society for Trust and Estate Practitioners. The benchmark has several institutional managers, such as HSBC, Rothschild and Royal Bank of Canada. Here is our STEP 2017 Q4 performance report, which details that over c. 5 years we have outperformed the benchmark by c. 10%, with c. 16% ...

What is your investment manager hiding in your portfolio?

Vikash Gupta, CEO and Ashish Vasudeva, Head of Clients at VAR Capital explain what it is they look for when reviewing their clients’ portfolios. Since we left the world of private banks to set up a multi-family office, clients expect us to analyse not just the investment portfolios managed by our firm, but also the ...

VaR Capital CIO shares his market views with Finance Magazine

VaR Capital Co-Founder and CIO Rajat Sharma shares his views on the markets with the editor of Portfolio Adviser magazine. Faded optimismCIO Rajat Sharma says: “We feel the equity markets are overvalued and there are imminent geopolitical risks that could lead to a correction. The five-year investment grade credit spreads are also at a historic ...