Movers & Shakers of 2022

The year 2022 was quite eventful with the equity markets being resilient and outperforming majority of the equity markets across the world. However, mutual funds had their own winners and losers. In this article, Henil Shah analyses the mutual fund industry and also lists those who brought about a change in the overall momentum.

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The Indian stock markets outperformed most global markets in 2022, making investors richer in terms of market capitalisation by more than Rs 16.36 lakh crore. Despite geopolitical uncertainties, high global inflation and consistent selling by foreign investors in India, domestic flows remained resilient, thus helping the benchmark indices hit new all-time highs in 2022.

Meanwhile, the global equity markets witnessed a sharp recovery in October and November last year as slightly dovish comments by the US Federal Reserve and the prospects of China reopening dominated the headlines. The global markets outperformed the Indian markets in this recovery after many quarters. The Indian headline benchmark indices crossed the previous all-time high levels.

This saw the markets making new highs multiple times in November 2022. The regaining of all-time high levels was least expected a few months back when economic news flows ranging from the Federal Reserve rate hike to China slowdown to geopolitical tensions to elevated crude oil prices were pointing towards a cautious approach for equities, in general. The markets, however, witnessed higher volatility in December 2022 near their all-time high levels amid some profit booking. The global economy continued to slow down with many indicators pointing at slowing or negative growth momentum. While the US' GDP growth for Q3CY22 came in better-than expected, high frequency indicators deteriorated with emerging weakness in the housing sector.