Aug. 8 : Samir Arora, the head of Asian emerging markets of Alliance Capital Management, manages $ 500 million in Indian and overseas funds, but admitted to having lost 40 per cent of his investments in the US in the tech melt down last year. In a free-wheeling interview with Aniek Paul, he said he was not bothered by the loss. 'What is more important is the performance of my funds. I can earn many times the amount lost in bonus and incentives if my funds perform well.' On Indian markets... Why can't we stop being bearish? Indian markets are not bleeding. The foreigners are not as concerned as the Indians. Even after the MSCI downgrade, money has been consistently flowing into the Indian markets from overseas, but we Indians can't stop being bearish. I get some 150 telephone calls everyday from different brokers and institutions in India, but I've still not managed to convince them that they should stop being bearish. On tech stocks... There isn't a case any more to be over-aggressive on the sector. Companies like Hero Honda are doing better than most of the leading IT firms. Nevertheless, the Indian IT companies are still growing-albeit at a slower pace. But the ones in the US are all falling. We are still better off. On managing investments... I have never been fleet-footed in managing investments. In the long run, it doesn't help. You do that at times to prove that your calls were right. But that does not add considerably to the overall returns. All you need to do is pick the right sectors, and the right stocks within them. You don't always get them right. I make new mistakes every day, but there are always two correct calls compensating for the one mistake I commit. And don't expect all the stocks in your portfolio to rally together. It would be pretty scary if that happened. When they fall, there will be none to subsidise the loss. It should be a like a relay race, where one takes off as the other cools off. On accounting subterfuges... In India, promoters make pocket money by manipulating the books. In the US the managers make the companies bankrupt. Jokes apart, neither are the Indian companies as leveraged as the likes of Enron, nor are the promoters/ managers in India selling the shares they hold in the company. In the US, the managers were on a selling spree, and they had to conceal the figures to prevent the share prices from falling. On his own investments... My funds in India are parked in the schemes I manage. I don't look after my investments in the US-despite the tech meltdown I did not sell a single share of Intel, which I had bought when I lived in the US. Fund managers should never be worried about their own investments. They can always earn much more than they lose if they do their work well. On future plans... A friend of mine called me today to say, 'The rumour about Alliance sacking you has bottomed out.' The latest rumour is I am quitting Alliance to start my own hedge fund. That's better than being sacked...' It's all rubbish. People evaluate the investment manager and his team before investing. If you desert your investors, you cannot go back to them and ask for money again. I know there are no entry and exit loads these days, but investors' money won't follow Samir Arora wherever he goes.