I normally like to reach a conference an hour before the kick off. But thanks to amazingly bad routing by Uber, I reached half an hour before time!

The first speaker was Anthony Serhan – and one key takeaway was that India was in the top (with USA) regarding legislation and disclosure. Must actually thank Sameer Arora for starting the MONTHLY DISCLOSURE OF FULL PORTFOLIO…which became the industry norm. Oops the regulator does not get credit for this. Anthony also said ‘disclosing where the fund manager invests’ is another important thing where India equals USA. I wish more journalists paid attention to this and did some articles – the common man is not going to be in a position to make much meaning of this. Anthony had a chart showing that India was on par with Canada, Singapore, Hongkong – countries with a much older history of mutual funds and regulation. Nice. Sebi, you are up there.

The next speaker was Uday Kotak, and he did speak well. He said the role of the psu banks will have to be reviewed. I loved when he said ‘Psu banks were created to reduce the concentration of lending to a few borrowers..and today the psu banks are stuck with NPA given to a few big borrowers’. So true. He spoke of GST, Npa chasing, Insolvency laws, ..etc. as short term pain and long term gain. He also said the country from being banking led will be now better served by banks, asset management companies, life insurance, brokerage, asset reconstruction companies, rating agencies – and the one sided banking monoliths will be pushed to perform better. He spoke about how excited he was today – maybe more than how excited he was 32 years ago when he started. The introducer forgot to announce that Uday has created more wealth in percentage terms than the Oracle of Omaha. U.K. also said that tons of new jobs will be created in wellness, sports, leisure industries, and he in Kotak bank will be a net hirer of people. He warned distributors that the world is waiting to use technology to eliminate them. Well, well.

Attributes of successful asset managers. Did attend, but nothing really to take away for me. Asking managers should we invest is not really a sensible question. They just keep saying ‘if the valuation is high take a 10 year view and if the valuation is low you can take a 2/3 year view. Also while the managers where trying to be careful in using words like ‘toppish’ and not ‘at the top’ kind of language – sorry guys not enough clarity. Nikunj Dalmis of ET Now was anchoring the session and it had Ajay Garg, Neelesh Surana (no clue where Swaroop Mohanty vanished after the session!), Sohini Andani and Vinit Sambre…were the participants.

Sanjoy Bhattacharyya as usual enthralled the audience and held us well in behavioral finance …and as usual showed us how much of reading he does. Of course the ability to read, understand, and make money out of that!

I would like a 3/4 member discussion on Equity Management – Sanjoy to anchor with Sameer Arora, S Naren, and Ramdeo Aggarwal …for a 4 hour discussion..

these are the ones that stayed with me..sure there were other sessions too…..will write about them…but hey, tomorrow is another day!

Ridham Desai Morgan Stanley @ Morningstar Conference in Mumbai