Why Kotak Chose Hybrid First: A Conversation on Infinity SIF's Strategy and the Road Ahead

With the Infinity Hybrid Long-Short Fund's NFO in its second week, Kalpesh Jain, the SIF Fund Manager at Kotak Mahindra Asset Management, has laid out the thinking behind the AMC's choice of a hybrid strategy for its debut SIF product, and shared a broader view of where he believes the category is headed.

The case for hybrid over equity or debt Jain explained that market conditions played a central role in Kotak's decision, pointing to India's broadly range-bound equity markets over the prior two years as a key reason the AMC favoured a hybrid, absolute-return-oriented approach for its first launch. Hybrid SIFs, he noted, are designed to generate returns across a range of market conditions — rising, flat, or even mildly negative — a flexibility he considers particularly relevant given uncertain directional market returns.

On what differentiates Kotak's approach Asked what would set Infinity SIF apart as more AMCs enter the space, Jain pointed to two factors: a fund management team built specifically around long-short and alternative investment experience — rather than one drawn primarily from traditional long-only desks, which he suggested is the case at several rival AMCs — and Kotak's broader brand reach and distribution strength, which he believes allows the AMC to engage a wider set of investors than smaller or newer entrants.

A bigger view of the category's potential Jain offered a bullish long-term view of SIFs as an asset class, suggesting that taxation advantages, flexible strategies and risk-managed derivative usage could eventually drive migration of investor capital from PMS and AIFs into the SIF structure — potentially positioning SIFs as India's second-largest investment category after mutual funds over time.

He also flagged distributor readiness as one of the category's near-term constraints: based on available data at the time, only around 6,000 of India's roughly 2.5 lakh mutual fund distributors had cleared the SIF certification exam — about 2.5% of the overall distributor base. Kotak, he said, has been running training programmes to help distributors become SIF-ready, with encouraging early response, while noting ongoing industry discussion around making the NISM certification process more practical and accessible to widen participation further.