Thematic Investing: Spotting Structural Themes Before They Become Mainstream

It's a truth well acknowledged in the markets, that extraordinary wealth is created when the investors spot a powerful theme before it captures the imagination of the crowd. To ride such a wave in its infancy, is to participate in returns—so outsized that they defy neat calculation.

- By Shashank Jain, Founder, Balaji Investments.

Conventional wisdom offers familiar rules of thumb—buy financials when growth accelerates and stressed loans recede; tilt towards technology when the currency weakens. But genuine fortunes are rarely built by following the surface correlations. They come from discerning the deeper structural currents that quietly reshape the market's future.

Consider India's Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) sector. It's not very long ago that sceptics dismissed it outrightly. The consensus view was that India's cost structures and ecosystem could never rival China's scale, and that the country's share in global EMS would languish below one percent.