Jefferies’ Chris Wood increases bet on Zomato, reduces investment in ONGC

“The investment in Zomato in the India long-only portfolio will be increased by one percentage point by shaving the investment in Oil & Natural Gas Corp,” the global equity strategist said in his weekly Greed & Fear newsletter.

In late May, Wood had picked Zomato for his India long-only portfolio and assigned a weight of 4%. On the other hand, he had removed HDFC Life Insurance from the portfolio.

After lagging in 2022, shares of Zomato rebounded sharply in 2023, gaining a whopping 27%. The stock scaled a 52-week high of Rs 80.3 earlier this month. Besides Zomato, Reliance Industries, Godrej Properties, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Macrotech Developers, SBI Life Insurance, Larsen & Toubro, and Bajaj Finance are also part of Wood’s long-only portfolio.

RIL, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, and HDFC Bank each have a weightage of 5%, in Asia ex-Japan long-only portfolio, while Macrotech Developers and Godrej Properties have a weightage of 4%.

Outside India, Wood has increased the allocation to American multinational technology firm Nvidia in the global long-only equity portfolio by one percentage point. The investments in Alibaba and TSMC will also be increased by one percentage point each, Wood said.

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The growing traction in generative artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the reasons why Wood increased his bet on Nvidia. “GREED & fear hears that total cloud capex is currently running at around $150 billion a year. Given that the AI servers are apparently more than ten times the price of regular servers…either they increase capex significantly to increase their AI capacity or they have to slash spending on regular servers,” Wood said in the note.This is why he believes it makes more sense in owning Nvidia than the likes of Intel or AMD.

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