White Oak India Equity AIF
WhiteOak PMS | Equity | | AIFIME's View on White Oak India Equity AIF
Strategy
Quality Growth Investing
Investment Fund
The highly diversified investment approach, backed by strong investment processes & a highly seasoned investment team, makes WhiteOak India Equity AIF a good option for investors seeking a PMS strategy with superior risk-adjusted returns (as compared to the potentially more volatile concentrated PMS strategies).
Fund's Strategy View
The White Oak India Equity AIF focuses on investing in a diversified portfolio of high-quality Indian companies with strong growth potential. The fund seeks to generate attractive long-term returns for investors by actively managing its investments and capitalizing on opportunities in the Indian equity market.
Fund Performance
The fund has underperformed peers in the last 5yr trailing returns.
IME's View on WhiteOak PMS
View on AMC
Founded by a highly credible CIO with strong investment credentials and a solid research team, White Oak offers a reliable alternative investment option for long-term capital deployment.
AMC's Pedigree
White Oak's strong investment pedigree is founded on the expertise of its founder, Prashant Khemka, and further reinforced by significant investments in building a top-tier research team. WhiteOak is a truly global investments firm, with ~70% of its assets being India Offshore.
AMC Team
Prashant Khemka is arguably one of the most pedigreed fund managers in the Indian alternatives space (with extensive experience in Goldman Sachs AMC, which he left as CIO & Lead PM for both their India & Global Emerging Market funds). Prashant's strong pedigree comes from his extensive experience at Goldman, his ability to scale both the India & GEM funds into ~$2.5 bn funds each, and the strong longer-term outperformance to benchmarks delivered by both these strategies. The research team supporting Prashant is highly experienced, and the firm's founder also serves as the CIO, ensuring long-term stability in investment processes.
Investment Philosophy
White Oak follows a proven strategy of investing in high-quality businesses at good prices, which has consistently generated strong returns for Prashant during his time at Goldman Sachs.
Investment Philosophy
- Great Business: well managed, scalable long-term opportunity, strong returns on incremental capital, strong execution & governance track record
- Attractive Valuations: aim to identify businesses where the estimated intrinsic value is significantly different from market prices
- Focus on stocks: as compared to focusing on the macro
- Avoid businesses with red flags: poor corporate governance, weak incremental ROCEs, potential obsolescence risk
White Oak’s Investment Culture is driven by
- Team of local experts with global experience: strong culture of performance aligned with client portfolio
- Time Tested Processes: driven by disciplined fundamental research & a proprietary OpcoFinco analytical framework that has been honed over 2 decades
- Bottom up Stock Selection based philosophy: Buy great businesses at Attractive values | Invest in businesses, don’t bet on macro
- Balanced Portfolio Construction: Aim to drive performance through stock-selection & not top-down bets on macro factors
INVESTMENT PROCESS
- Avoid misgovernance: White Oak aims to avoid misgoverned companies by recognizing various forms of misgovernance such as companies cheating existing promoters, cheating investors, unethical or illegal business administration processes, misaligned interests or objectives and poor accounting
- Universe Screening: Beginning with a large investible universe (~750 companies with a >$150 mn mkt cap), WhiteOak narrows down the universe to what it defines as great businesses (~150), from which it invests in between 30-50 companies which it believes to be attractively valued
- Time tested analytical framework: driven by idea generation, analysis, decision & sizing and an ongoing evaluation
PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION AND RISK MANAGEMENT
- Balanced Portfolio Approach: White Oak follows a balanced Portfolio that aims to avoid market timing or sector rotation and aims for alpha generation through stock selection.
- Typical exposure limits: Single Stock: 10% at market value | Single promoter group: 25% | Single industry 30%
- Proposed Market Cap weights: 40-60% Large Cap and 60-40% Mid and Smallcap
Trailing Performance
| 1yr | 3yr | 5yr | Since Inception | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White Oak India Equity AIF | -5.1 | 13.3 | 17.8 | 17.1 |
| S&P BSE 500 | -6.6 | 14.7 | 19.2 | 16.04 |
| Alpha over Broad Mkt BM | 1.5 | -1.4 | -1.4 | 1.1 |
Performance as of: 30-Sep-25 | Inception Date: 13-Feb-18 | Performance are post-fees, pre-taxes. Global funds denominated in USD or fund currency.
Investment team
Prashant Khemka | 5-star rated FM
Founder & CIO | 27 yrs Experience | 8 yrs at current firm
Past Experience: Goldman AMC (CIO - Global EM Fund), State Street Global (FM)
Prashant founded WhiteOak in 2017 with an impeccable investment track record. Prashant was the CIO & Lead Fund Manager for the Goldman Sachs India Equity & Global Emerging Market Funds. These funds have won multiple global awards and accolades for consistent investment performance. Over Prashant's tenure GS India Equity scaled to a $2.5 bn fund from scratch (delivering 266% gross returns vs 66% for the benchmark), while GS GEM scaled from $675 mn to $2.6 bn (with a 36% gross US $ return vs 13.1% for the benchmark).
