Garner said investors should stay away from consumer staples and low-beta sectors and instead buy high-beta ones. “We have increased our exposure particularly to infrastructure and construction and the road building programme is an extremely interesting one to play and the property sectors as well.”

We don’t think that this is going to turn into a meaningful downturn in markets. The underlying picture is one of global economic recovery and we suspect that in Asia and emerging markets, corporate earnings are going through the trough of the cycle right now. So the 2010 outlook strategically is very good.

We are overweight Indian equities. There has been a poor monsoon season and we are factoring that into our gross domestic product (GDP) forecast but the industrial production and corporate earnings side of the economy are very strong, in fact beating expectations on corporate earnings. Then we have measures that are coming forward on the fiscal side that we find quite encouraging particularly the corporate tax reduction that is being muted in the simplification of the tax code more generally, which I think will help investor sentiment towards India. So we are pretty comfortable in retaining an overweight on India here.

S:MC