Auto Stocks In Top Gear

With the market sentiment reversing in July, auto stocks are back in the limelight and remain hot favourites amongst investors. The question is whether the auto stocks will continue to outperform in 2022 and beyond? Yogesh Supekar discusses in detail the opportunities in the automotive sector and shares the outlook

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Recovery in auto stocks along with banks is always cheered by investors as most investors hold auto and banking stocks in their portfolio. Auto stocks are widely held and hence when the automotive sector does well it helps boost investor sentiments. If you wonder what is common between Galaxy Bearing, Kranti Industries, Rolex Rings, Shanthi Gears, Lumax Auto Technologies, HBL Power Systems, Mahindra and Mahindra, etc., you will find that most of the stocks are trading at 52-week highs with some trading at lifetime highs, thus outperforming the markets in 2022 – and they all belong to the same sector i.e. the automotive sector in India.

In fact, surprisingly the BSE Auto index is trading at lifetime highs when the BSE Sensex is trading lower by ~9 per cent from its all-time highs. The BSE Auto index has jumped higher by 182 per cent since March 2020 lows and is the top performing sectoral index on YTD basis, with only BSE Power index performing better than the BSE Auto index. Says Rahul Gaikwad whose diversified portfolio is skewed towards auto stocks: “My diversified portfolio has a higher weightage for auto stocks, simply because the auto business is easy to understand. These products (automobile) are visible on the roads, and it is not very difficult to understand which company is doing better than the others.”