ING Vysya to pick managers from TV show

MUMBAI: It’s not just any other game show you increasingly see on television today. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime to showcase your fund management skills. If you win, it’s also the opportunity to get trained at any of global asset manager ING’s offices worldwide. And if they find you’re really good, it might also be the chance to cut through the interview process and be directly appointed as a fund manager at ING Vysya Mutual Fund.

This, in a nutshell is what the ING Vysya Mutual Fund-sponsored “Indian Investor of the Year” (IIY) promises.

After remaining open for two weeks, the window for registrations closed on Monday. Says Vikaas M Sachdeva, country head - business development, ING Vysya Mutual Fund, “The response has been tremendous.” The fund house has received 6,000 applications till the last count. From these hopefuls, only nine will reach the final round after going through the various tough levels of elimination.

The game is about being given a notional corpus to invest and building a healthy portfolio around that. It will be aired from March 15 to the first week of June. “While the initial elimination round will look at absolute returns, thereafter, it becomes an entirely different ballgame,” says Jasraj Thakur, head of marketing and production, ING Vysya Mutual Fund.

“The candidate’s portfolio will be put through qualitative tests like how sound are the companies he has picked, the liquidity of his stocks, the diversity of his portfolio and so on. Besides, the panel of judges will also test how investment savvy the candidates are, their communication skills, analytical aptitude, ability to withstand pressure, knowledge about markets, and general awareness,” he adds.

The nine finalists, apart from managing their notional money, and being in tune with the markets on a real-time basis, will also be thrown new challenges like redemption pressures or fresh money coming in one sudden gush. At the end of each week, one candidate will be eliminated. The contestant remaining at the end of the eighth week will be declared the winner.

ING Vysya Mutual Fund sees this as a brand-building and investor education exercise through which it hopes to change the dynamics of the retail asset management market. “We want to tell people how difficult life would be without a mutual fund. It would give an evolved perception of how a mutual fund operates and the constraints faced by various fund managers,” says Sachdeva. “The same constraints being given to the nine participants and how they react would help us convey how every fund manager has his unique way of responding to circumstances,” he adds.

The fund house, whose total marketing budget in 2006 stood at around Rs 4 crore, is estimated to be spending about Rs 2.5-3.5 crore on this programme alone. CNBC TV18, whose channel CNBC Awaaz is airing the show, is also spending an equal amount.