New Delhi, Jul 2 (IANS): Christopher Wood, Global Head of Equity Strategy at Jefferies, has announced the launch of a long-only India portfolio similar to the existing long-only Japan and China portfolios.

Wood said India has nearly always had a significant representation in GREED & fear's long-only Asia ex-Japan portfolio, launched nearly 19 years ago at the end of 3Q02.

But for some reason ,GREED & fear has never had a dedicated long-only India portfolio. This will now change primarily because GREED & fear would like to add more Indian stocks which is not possible in the regional long-only portfolio since the idea is that these long-only portfolios, none of which can own cash, should be reasonably concentrated.

The Indian portfolio, which has been put together in consultation with Jefferies head of India research Mahesh Nandurkar, will start off with 16 stocks compared with the total of 21 stocks currently in the Asia ex-Japan long-only portfolio. Again, the portfolio cannot own cash.

Wood said this is certainly not a perfect time to start an Indian portfolio since the Sensex is near an all-time high though, for that matter, so are many other stock markets.

Still GREED & fear remains convinced that India is at the start of a new housing cycle after a seven-year downturn, after the mother of all consolidations in the developer industry, which is why there will be a 17 per cent weighting in the property sector.

This portfolio will be domestic demand focused though it will have a decent energy weighting to hedge, in part at least, the obvious risk of a higher oil price on Indian financials and other interest rate sensitive sectors.

GREED and fear remains bullish on oil.

The portfolio has 16 stocks, which includes ICICI Bank, HDFC, Bajaj Finance, Reliance Industries (RIL), ONGC, Maruti Suzuki India, Tata Steel and Jubilant FoodWorks.