Investors must keep faith in equities: Edelweiss MF KR SRIVATS New Delhi, July 3 Edelweiss Mutual Fund, a leading fund house, is cautiously optimistic about the Indian equity market in the next 3-4 months and unequivocally positive about its prospects in the next 2-3 years. Investors should use this volatility to get into markets rather than stay away and keep faith in equities while investing in tranches in current volatile markets, its Chief Investment Officer Trideep Bhattacharya said. New equity fund The mutual fund house is launching a new fund Edelweiss Focused Equity Fund on July 12. Equities (long-only funds) will be a focus area in the next few years, Bhattacharya told BusinessLine. " We are well represented in debt, we are reasonably well represented in hybrid (still have room to grow) and in Trideep Bhattacharya equities (long only) we are sub scale and that is where our next focus area is," he said. Edelweiss Mutual Fund, which has assets under management of about 81,126 crore as of end March 31, 2022 is launching an equity fund after three years. The last time this fund house launched an equity fund was in February 2019 a small cap equity fund. Three-fold approach Sharing the investment strategy of the Focused Fund, Bhattacharya said that it would have a focused portfolio of 25-30 stocks with strong business models. It will have a benchmark and sector-agnostic approach and a multicap portfolio. The Focused Fund will be based on three themes Brands (buy established and emerging brands across B2B and B2C segments); market share gainers (buy market share leaders and emerging market share gainers), and innovators (buy innovators, adaptors and enablers of change in business dynamics) he said. The weightage to be given to the three themes is undecided as yet, he added. "Our next step is to have focus on long only funds in next five years. We are launching Focused fund. Focused fund was a gap in our portfolio and hence we are doing it. This new fund will complete the basket of offering in equity side. For investors looking at long term, focused investing is good way to think about sub themes are strong wealth creator fields," he said.