Safir Anand Shares His Investment Playbook – Markets

In a wide-ranging conversation with ET Now’s Ayesha Faridi, Safir Anand, one of India’s most awarded IP lawyers and a closely followed voice on equity markets, laid out his entire investment philosophy with a candour that is rare in financial television. From his contrarian March buying spree to his sector picks across electric vehicles, hospitals, water purification and EMS companies, Safir offered a masterclass in staying sane, humble and opportunistic in a market that rewards patience over noise.

Faridi opened by asking what actually triggers a buying decision for Safir. His answer was revealing. He said his competence lies more in trying to understand whether a business can be scaled, and if scalability exists, then the quality of earnings becomes paramount. He explained that a business could have scalability but without meaningful cash flows due to thin margins or distortions from various factors, making the combination of scalability and cash flow quality the real test.

He described his approach as looking for tactical shifts, a company moving from small cap to midcap, midcap to large cap, or a sector undergoing a structural change. He said he tries not to bother too much about index levels, Sensex or Nifty or expiry dates, and focuses instead on finding businesses and spreading buying over time in a disciplined manner.

Faridi asked whether practical observation beats balance sheet analysis. Safir was emphatic: behavioural science is a better friend for an investor than any spreadsheet.

“Even the most sane people react to news at the spur of the moment which is not necessarily determined by what the business is doing,” he said. He argued that when competent entrepreneurs face problems, those problems usually come for the entire industry, not just one company. The real question, he said, is whether there is an opportunity in the excess reaction of the market, either on the upside or downside, and whether disciplined phased buying can help an investor capitalise on that.

He was equally forthcoming about his own vulnerability. He said he wants to be more humble because success in yesterday’s picks can make investors overconfident and lead them to assume they will not make mistakes tomorrow. He said his entire book on investing mistakes was built on this premise, and that he now approaches every sector view with the caveat that any change in his underlying assumptions will cause him to revise his thinking. He said he has no hard and fast rules about what he will like in the future.

The most striking part of the conversation was Safir’s account of what he did during the market crash of March 2026, when crude oil was above $125, doomsday headlines dominated financial media and most investors were paralysed.

“I personally felt, and I even tweeted this at the risk of not being an adviser, that in March I cleaned up my bank account and bought the market left, right and centre,” he said. He was clear that he was not buying to make money in April or May. His horizon was March 31, 2027. As long as the deployment did not cause him to skip a meal or lose sleep, he felt it was justified.

His reasoning was simple: markets were reacting with human doom-seeking behaviour, and it is a human tendency to find solutions rather than keep adding to problems. He described the reaction as being entirely behavioral rather than grounded in genuine business destruction.

When Faridi pressed him specifically about what he was thinking when most investors were frozen, watching crude prices and West Asia conflict headlines on the March 13 low, Safir said serious investors always carry a subconscious wish list of businesses they want to own but may have missed because valuations were too stretched or because a big order came and the stock ran up before they could act. When markets fall, he said, that wish list starts approaching you. The only question you have to answer is whether the fall is a temporary phase or a long-term structural problem.

Faridi asked him directly about buying Infosys when it briefly touched three digits, using Mumbai street parlance. Safir confirmed he had bought it. He explained that the question he asked himself was not whether the management was finished but whether AI capabilities would actually make manufacturing and services companies like Infosys more effective rather than destroying them. If the answer was that a stock could at minimum beat inflation, beat a fixed deposit and give 13 to 15 percent returns from that level, and the market noise was entirely against it, then a phased buying approach made complete sense. He added that not owning a stock for some years does not mean it is out of his life. He simply had something better to buy at the time.

On what he actually bought during the March correction, Safir gave several specific examples without making formal recommendations.

He said EMS companies, or electronics manufacturing services businesses, fell sharply and it became fashionable on social media to mock how far they had fallen without looking at how far they had grown before that. He evaluated whether manufacturing was genuinely destroyed and concluded it was not. Oil was at $125 and people were saying it could go to $150, but his personal view was that the world would unite to bring oil down, which then benefited these companies. He added that the Indian government repeatedly emphasises manufacturing, is signing FTAs with manufacturing emphasis and is talking about ease of business improvements. He bought some EMS companies in March and said they have subsequently risen 30 to 50 to even 70 or 80 percent from those levels.

Another March buy was a water purification company that caters to data centres, which require large amounts of water for cooling. The market leader in that segment got severely sold down because of general panic. Safir bought it and said the stock was up another 50 percent just two or three months later.

Safir was most expansive when talking about electric vehicles, which he described as one of the most obvious tactical themes of the current moment.

On commercial EVs more broadly, he said companies making electric buses and trucks are coming on channels and talking about vision and standards. He finds encouragement when he sees that even during heat waves, people are willing to take air-conditioned buses because the economics are not so destructive that they would rather wait for a non-AC option. Europe is also now grappling with air conditioning problems, he noted, which makes public EV transportation a global theme rather than just an Indian one.

He said he bought Max Healthcare at around Rs 90 and the stock is now around Rs 1,100. But his question today is not about what it has already done. He asks himself whether there is scope for what is still happening on the medical side. His reasoning: anti-obesity drugs are generating enormous fascination but they do not address dialysis, diabetes or cancer. These are serious and persistent medical challenges for which there is no simple cure. India still lacks enough hospital beds in many parts of the country and some hospitals, even in cities, are 50 to 60 kilometres away from patients suffering heart attacks. Acquisitions continue in the sector with both foreign and institutional money chasing hospital chains. He said he has a margin of safety so a 50-rupee decline from current levels does not bother him as long as his long-term return expectation remains intact.

He also mentioned buying a hospital company that caters to Africa, which has performed beyond his own expectations, and flagged medical tourism between India and Africa as an emerging and underappreciated theme.

Safir rattled off a series of additional themes he is watching or has invested in, each with its own thesis.

Cybersecurity he called a very large business in the making, particularly as every transaction moves to the phone. He has invested in the unlisted space here and will move to listed players if credible and affordable options emerge.

Organic food appeals to him because of increasing consumer concern about adulteration and the FSSAI crackdowns. He noted many pure-play organic food companies are unlisted, so he looks for the axe-and-shovel proxy plays in adjacent listed businesses.

Specialised textiles he sees as a significant opportunity given FTAs being signed with emphasis on manufacturing. He drew the analogy to metals and power stocks, which were once dismissed as pure commodities before delivering enormous returns.

Lab diamonds are another position. He said he started reading about why the diamond sector was collapsing and his attention shifted to lab diamonds, where he now has an investment.

On portfolio construction, Safir said his historical orientation has been heavily toward small and midcap stocks. In the March correction, he took a contrarian step and added large caps because some of them were being ignored purely due to their return matrix over recent periods rather than any fundamental deterioration.

He said in March he brought his cash level to zero. Not because he will not be able to pay his bills, he clarified, but because he was fully deployed in opportunities he had conviction on. He now looks at his portfolio periodically and if something has run up too much for his comfort, he prunes it partially, not because timing is easy but because discipline demands review. He advised viewers that investors should always have an alternate source of income so that equity stays truly long-term money and does not get disrupted by life events forcing premature selling.

Faridi ended by asking what someone sitting on cash should do now that markets have recovered significantly from March lows.

Safir’s answer was direct: invest in phases. If you invest in phases and the market goes up, you feel good because what you bought has appreciated. If it comes down, you feel relatively better than someone fully invested because you have dry powder to deploy at lower prices. He cautioned against owning too much of any single stock, against fixating on how far a stock has fallen from its high as a reason to expect recovery, and against assuming all sectors and stocks will follow the same long-term market trajectory.

He also offered a gentle but pointed observation on mental resilience. Most people lose the long-term investing battle not because of bad analysis but because of the mental battle. Even fund managers, he noted, get so consumed by monthly NAV comparisons that they forget their own five and ten-year track records. The ability to become a self-motivating coach for your own investing, he said, is the single most underrated edge in equity markets.