3 Indian Women Leaders In Finance Discuss Long Term Investing Mindset

TITLE: 3 Indian Women Leaders in Finance discuss Long-term Investing Mindset CHANNEL: Waterfield Advisors DATE: 2026-06-06 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Men sometimes tend to be a little bit overconfident when they’re investing. >> Indonesian 90%. I’m not surprised that women don’t panic for the first 20%. The globe is not the US. I would argue that it’s absolutely the best time to be allocating a little bit to when we talk about long-term investing. What is it that we’re talking about? >> Doing something with a short-term is always counterproductive. Nobody has a clue what a equity index is going to do in one year. How do you go about evaluating these industries? This has actually come from analyzing thousands and thousands of companies and saying what is that nuance which is very interesting. How do we balance the India long-term growth story with the global opportunities which are available >> you cannot forget that the rupee depreciates over a period of time at least 30 40% of your allocation should be global. How do you think women approach fixed income as an asset class? Never look at it as a wealth creation. It is more of a wealth stability engine. In your view, what would be an ideal global diversification portfolio? Look at the period 2003 to 2007. Those 4 and 1/2 years, US did very little. Emerging markets went up three and a half, four times. India went up six times. Brazil went up 10 times. All the stories are according to what’s happening in the market.

Building long-term mindset for managing wealth. Interesting topic, especially at these times. We’ve all thought about it, spoken about it, and actually believed that when the time comes, we’d be able to do it. Well, easier said than done. Human emotions overrule everything. Your markets turn volatile, your headlines shift and there we go emotions following over. And when you look at it from the lens of a woman, further you know factors start creeping up. Your behavioral and societal factors start shaping how we look at financial decision- making. For generations, women have grown around wealth, but very rarely have they been asked to sit at the table and participate in the decision-making process. Today, women are creating, managing and inheriting wealth in unprecedented ways. Globally, we are expected to manage close to about $34 trillion in financial assets. And we see the same trend follow in India. In fact, when we look around the room today, we have entrepreneurs, we have leaders, we have women who’ve taken on their family businesses. And yet, when it comes to financial decision making, we hesitate. Additionally, the overflow of information, none of this is making our lives easier. With this, let me pose my first question to all three of you here. Um, so when you know, we’ve been through quite a few black swan events over the last few years, including the COVID pandemic, one we are going through right now. We’re in the midst of the US uh, Israel and Iran war, which is having an impact on our portfolios. How much do you think investing success actually comes down to behavior rather than financial expertise?

In fact, last few years most of my reading um rather than being on finance has been on behavior which is actually all the ways your own brain trips you up and has evolved to trip you up because the human brain has evolved for only two things survival and procreation. It has absolutely no interest in how well your portfolio does. So that is why we have all these things very hardwired within us herd behavior. It’s very difficult to be in a minority of one not to do what everybody else is doing. We hate to take losses. Um you know a 10 lakh loss hurts us much more than the happiness that a 10 lakh profit gives us. So bottom line is that we have to make our wealth management such that it actually uh takes us away from some of these things which are designed to trip us up. So you know that so you have to do the basics right. I always say that good investing is boring. You don’t have to and it is neither as simple nor as complex as we make it out to be. You don’t have to have the magic formula for how to find a multibagger in the stock market. Uh because surprise surprise, nobody in the world has this crystal ball. But you get the basic asset allocation right. How much in India, how much globally, how much in fixed income, how much in equities, how much in gold uh or uh you know other assets like that you are already 85 90% of the way through. So you don’t need to freeze. I mean too many women and also many men also freeze that you know but you don’t need to do that you you get the basic asset allocation right you understand the basics uh and uh don’t also think I mean I was on stage not very long back on another on a there’s this most powerful women awards and I said this is a room full of so-called the most powerful women in India and I can tell you most of of them are not managing their own money and from the faces I could see I was right for the majority of them. So you know take charge of your own money. Just because the men of your life in your life talk in cocktail parties about the stock market doesn’t mean that they know anything much more than what you know. So take charge yourself. Do the basics right? We’ll talk about of course some of those things as we go along. What the basics are.

I’ll I’ll build on what Dina said and coming back to your question Shilpi. Uh is it expertise or behavior? So the honest answer is expertise is the key that opens the door. You can’t come in and have wonderful behavior with no expertise at all. Uh because then you won’t you’ll you’ll have a very calm temperament. You’ll have all of that, but you’ll be still clueless. So you have to have the basics. Once you have the basics, that’s the key that opens the door. And then 90% is behavior. But I’m going to give you some interesting data points here. One of which is from one of my investors IFC and similar to to this report they also have a IFC gender smart investing report and that gave a very interesting data point that gender balanced funds realized excess net IRRa of 1.7 percentage points greater than male dominated funds I’m assuming well it was greater than single sex but I’m assuming ing single sex funds will be male funds. Not too many single sex only female funds. Uh controlling for vintage geography and strategy. Let that sink in for a minute. 1.7 percentage point excess IR and this is over a long period of time right when controlling for all these other variables. So the difference comes from behavior according to me. So I’ll just give you two points. What what I’ve seen anecdotally is that men sometimes tend to be a little bit overconfident when they’re investing, right? Uh leading to the classic mistake of confirmation bias. I’m so great. I know what I’m doing. All the data is going to confirm what I already know. And boom, that’s where you start making mistakes. Right? All of us in the room will come in saying, “Uh, I’m not really sure. I’m going to do my research. I want to be 110% prepared. Guess what? That leads to very thoughtful decisions. And you know, I would like to pull up one thing. I noticed on one of the posters, it said risk averse. And it was struck and said riskaware. And I think that was a brilliant point, Somia, because women have a very holistic view of risk. What do I do in in my business as a private equity fund manager? I price risk. That’s really what I do. So if you can look at all the risk of a situation and price it then your behavior will automatically become I’m not surprised that women don’t panic for the first 20%. Because you’ve understood the risk so well before coming into an investment before coming into you you’re so prepared you’ve understood the risk so well that you’re able to be calm. So this comes to us very naturally. So I love talking about this book. There was a financial journalist called Luan Loftton. It’s a very old book, but she wrote, you know, men, women, and investing, something like that. I’m paraphrasing, but she essentially came out and said that uh and and Warren Buffett. So she came in and her conclusion was that Warren Buffett has a very feminine style of investing. Uh and she went and told him that. She said, “I think when it comes to investing, you’re like a girl.” and he said absolutely. Okay. Yeah. So you know u financial temperament is way way more powerful and potent than financial knowledge. I think uh and and temperament ties into behavior. I think that is super super important. In fact in our investment uh thesis we use something known as incube. Now INCube is the um acronym for in is for information. Q QU is for the quantitative which is the technical part and the be is the behavior. So I’d say that you know it is super important to have control of your emotions when you are investing and women know this the best. Why? Because we cut the umbilical cord. It is so important. We know when to cut the umbilical cord. It is so very important. So I think keep that in mind that a the world of investments is gender agnostic. I know there are gazillions of studies which give you the balance of uh how the returns prove better and all that. So I’m not getting into all that gan but the point I’m trying to say is that when you see when markets are volatile and to your point um Warren Buffett said that in the near term the markets are a voting machine. Why voting machine? because popularity. Obviously uh versus in the long term it’s a weighing machine and when you are doing when you are running the marathon not a sprint that is when the fullness of your portfolio blossoms you know somebody sent Rajni Gandha to my house um yesterday and look beautiful but it’s still in a bud form you have to let it blossom you can’t keep asking every day it has to bloom a little bit So you have to let it bloom. But if you treat your investments like a voting machine which gives you instant gratification, you will get that when you post a picture or a story on Instagram and get your likes. Investments is not a popularity contest. So you have to hold your horns. We don’t have you know if I would have plotted a chart here uh of this stock and I’ll tell you soon who what that stock is. You would have seen starting from here going up there coming down but holding on never giving up going again and right here on top the if you look at P ratios if we understand that in equities you do the P ratio of this stock uh compared to the P ratio of a fund manager who’s managing these stocks this P ratio would be much higher and that stock I’m talking about is Mr. And that chart is the career graph. Look at the career graph today. He’s earning banana kotpati per episode much higher than probably what a fund manager of 10 years is earning. So I think the longevity and wanting to stay and never give it up. I think that is the behavioral question about if you don’t know what PE is, if you don’t know what PEG is, you don’t have to be feeling guilty. It’s absolutely okay because it’s that discipline that beggets discipline is not mathematical. It is only behavior. Imagine if you would have cut your entire portfolio out in 2020 when co struck. You wouldn’t have been able to double your money in two years. You wouldn’t have been able to you would have even now struggling to do that because you stayed on. So I think the mantra is clearly which what munai says. Thank you so much. Rajni Gandha, one of my favorite flowers. Dina, I’m uh coming to you with a question. Uh when we talk about long-term investing, uh in your mind, uh what is it that we’re talking about? Are just simply investing for longer periods of time or does this also overlay with what how we interpret risk, volatility, and economic cycles.

See, you have to look at it a little holistically. We started I started with saying you have to get the broad asset allocation right. So for example, you know, one of the worst pieces of financial advice that is still very common is that be 100% in equity when you are in your 20s and be 0% in equity when you retire. Both of these make no sense. Uh equity should be money you do not require for at least 8 to 10 years. So even if you’re 25 and doing very well professionally, you might lose your job, you might want to study further, you want might want to buy buy a house, there might be a medical emergency. So never be 100% in equity because no matter what anyone tells you and this is Bloomberg data, nobody has a clue what a equity index is going to do in one year. You know this is decades of data of US, every Wall Street firm you have heard of, every large bank you have heard of, they are completely off on their equity index projections for a year. Nobody has a clue. I have never given a equity index projection in January or at Diwali time for 30 years. I got the term for it only a couple of years ago. Objective ignorance which is not only things you don’t know about but you cannot know about. So but within the equity allocation do not buy and forget. This is one of the big myths I have talked about you know this is a this is my like 30 years of learning. This is my book on what are all the myths and this is one of the myths that buy and forget. We remember the survivors. We remember that somebody had bought an you this is one of our most memorable calls that in 1996 we said HDFC bank will become from a baby to Arnold Schwarzenegger. People remember how much money you would have made in HDFC Bank and Kota. People forget how many banks of that vintage went bust. Global Trust Bank, Times Bank, Centurion Bank, Yes Bank went through such a big problem. We remember that somebody’s grandfather bought Hindustan Lever. We forget that they are just as likely to have bought Premier Automobiles or JK or Tapper Group companies. You look at the list, original Sensex list, it is full of textile, shipping, paper industries we have forgotten about. And they were not fly by night companies. They were all companies with decades of history. They were the blue chips of the time. So be invested in equity as an asset class to some significant degree, but not the same old stocks. As I say, go to the last page of your DP statement, which for those of you who invest in equity, which looks which is something like our exes, we want to forget we ever loved them, you know. So, so, so you know G you have to look at it and get rid of whatever you need to get rid of and uh so that get that broad thing right get be invested in the category not necessarily the same stocks I mean Amitab Bachan is again a big outlier he’s a survivor you know so so many of his vintage never went beyond that first bus so you know those are Let I mean those are all very sexy stories. We as human beings we love success stories. We don’t want to look at all that went bust. If you look at risk also do not be at extreme ends of the risk spectrum. So you know don’t be only in fixed deposits and PF and don’t think you can become a day trader. You know I sometimes find women you know children have gone now I want to I want to become a full-time trader. That is also you know playing fast and lose with your money. So don’t be at either end of the risk spectrum. Do a sensible ris allocation. You don’t need to get into exotica. So I mean I’ll give you an example. If you save a lakh a year for 30 years and you put it in bank at about 5 to 6% you’ll end up with 75 lakhs. You are in a multi-asset product that gives you 9.5% you are at 1.6 1.7 crores. If you are a little more equity oriented 12 12 and a half% compounding you are at 3 crores. So 75 lakhs and three cores that’s the difference but you cannot therefore be hugging 100% of our money in 100% safe assets that doesn’t work but if you take risk yes at some point I mean it is not an if it is only a when you will have a loss on your portfolio so do not have this selft talk often times you know this is one thing which holds back women I’ve seen because their selft talk and the family talk is why did you get into this no see Now you’ve gone and lost money. So don’t do that. When I ask this question to men that they will say that how am I my half the half of them will say that my wife won’t even come to know that I have lost money. I’m not going to tell her. So let alone this being an issue in the family and half the time they won’t even come to know. So that’s the thing. So be sensible. Also look at other parts of risk. Uh no liquidity is an important one. So non-public markets if you go into there is a inherent illquidity risk. Look at this you know like this problem that has happened geopolitically. You see some of the largest private equity and private credit funds have stopped redemptions because inherently what they’re investing in is illquid. Sometimes when you invest in a product also look at things like exit load. If you are getting let us say inheritance uh and you are getting let us say uh uh property always remember that property is illlquid very difficult to sell in any reasonable time frame very difficult to get the prices that are quoted in the newspaper. So if your you know if your trade-off is getting eight eight crores of uh liquid uh of some kind of financial assets versus even a 10 or 12 cr house opt for the financial assets most of the time I would say. So you know those are things you have to think about on a broad risk spectrum. Uh but you know you have to consciously manage your money and get the broad strokes right.

Thank you so much Ia. Let me coming to you. Uh the current situation uh in the markets and the kind of volatility that we’ve seen uh has left an impact on the portfolio. Um at such times how do you recommend we stay focused on the long-term goal and how do we interpret volatility uh during this economic cycles? you know if you have you know constantly if you’re watching the market uh from 9 to 3:30 or 9 to4 u and and that’s what obviously the larger media covers uh it’s obvious that you might palpitate okay and I’m not saying you necessarily have to palpitate but you know at these times I would say the fillet shut it forget it really really works well as far as your portfolio is concerned because um ha hasn’t the house in which we live ever depreciated we may be oblivious to it and sometimes I say ignorance is bliss. So this is one kind of a situation where please tell yourself all is well. Have you seen the movie three idiots that chitar is telling all is well but he has no clue because even we don’t have you know there is a duration blindness with respect to war. There is volatility. Whoever told you gold and silver is not volatile. It is looking like student of the year. It is looking like a durand and sikandar but even durand and sikandar have their weak moments. So gold topped 5300 came down to under $5,000 an ounce. uh silver went up to $100 plus and now it is um somewhere at 7580. So I think even they have their moments of weakness. So I’d say the asset class that we love Indians love real estate Indian love Indians love gold their tolerance our threshold level is very very high we are bull we just kind of ignore because we don’t do a comparison every day. So I think the best thing to do in this see there is no doubt in my mind that this will resurrect but if you ask me only two people can tell you when that will happen liar or lucky people and none of us in this room are either. Lucky you maybe but as fund managers we’re not. So I’d say the next best thing is just hold on to it. You know I have investors even asking me today that should we stop our SIPs? We’ve seen the number dip a little bit, but I’m saying that I think doing something with a short-term, you know, with an objective or achieving something short-term is always counterproductive. And in investments, I think cutting the noise, wear noise cancellers, go on a holiday, you know, in fact, I tell my fund managers um uh we do something attribution. I tell them that if you go on a holiday and I see your portfolio day one and day 30 how it looks, that is called your existential uh alpha that you create. and treat that and treat as a fund manager. Think about that as your own investments as if you’re doing it and you’re the fund manager and just forget about it. It’s absolutely fine to you. You you cannot make money every day, every hour, every moment. It’s just not possible. So I think cutting the noise is the most important thing because this situation is not in any of our control. But two emotions in our control, one is greed, second is fear. There is nothing, there is no third. I mean I’ll just like to add to that we started with behavior and this is not my opinion this is data in every research study around the world that sentiment is a contraindicator when you are asking this question should I stop my SIP should I get out of the market in probability terms the next period returns are above normal it is when moneym appears super easy as it appeared for the first 8 months of 2024 the returns are below normal real estate long-term India compounding ing this is national housing board data across 50 cities is four and odd percent. So it is far far below any financial asset in addition to the illi liquidity. This is the return. So you know always look at the data. So I mean house you live in has different considerations. Real estate is investment. I think there’s only one use case which is parking or black money. Other than that you know there is really no financial reason why you would that’s I mean you have anecdotes. Yes my uncle bought this place and then Gura or greater Nida this happened and but this is the broad data across cities. But you know this is what I told my so just one sorry uh I I I told this uh person yesterday that with physical assets India has a relationship with financial assets we have a situationship please don’t do that situationship let’s leave it to the Gen Z we’re not

Gen Z and I’m going to jump in here because I’m I’m going to be the contraotic whatever uh illlquid exotic all the stuff that’s been that’s been going on. Uh I would argue that it’s absolutely the best time to be allocating a little bit to private equity. It’s long-term. We are not linked to the markets. We have the ability to sit back and say this business makes a lot of sense from a fundamental perspective. We have the ability to not panic. And I’ll talk about why I think private equity makes a lot of sense today. So fundamentally there are two factors for the environment to be conducive for private equity and I’ll start with the first factor because we’ve been hearing real estate illquid blah blah is exits okay if I look at the Indian private equity market over the last decade $255 billion has exited this market 155 billion exited in in the last 5 years. So suddenly the market is reaching an inflection point. I mean I remember the time when I used to go to conferences in the US. I used to go to conferences in Europe 10 15 years ago and all I had to say to offend somebody was I am an Indian private equity investor. But that is all I had to say. And then I would have to hear lots of things about why you know I was such a terrible person and the industry was so horrible. I no longer have to do that because exits are credible. Exits are happening. From an investment opportunity perspective, I think the time is brilliant, right? You if you look at the GDP growth of 2800 and if you look at the GDP doubling over the next, you know, few years, that’s exactly what happened to China in 27 to1. That was the golden period. And so you’ll see every sector booming. We look at things from a slightly different lens and we have core investment sort of themes and one of them which I will share with this with this audience and I hope you like it is women oriented consumption. So we think that women are going to be the world’s greatest influencers. We think the market for women oriented consumption in India is $1.5 trillion. $1.5 trillion and most of my counterparts in private equity are men. I have a massive gender arbitrage. This is one of my core investment themes. In our first fund, we invested in a company called Enammer which became de facto the leading offline lingerie player in the country. In our second fund, we have invested in a company called Gynova which is you know women’s health. So it’s India private equity women. So it’s women women’s health for fertility using Ayurveda. So uh I think that yes private equity is exotic. Private equity is illquid. That’s the headline. But we as women know that it’s not about the headline that we dig deeper. We dig deeper. And if if ever there was the perfect time to allocate a bit of your you know uh investment amount into something which is exotic and illquid. I would argue the time is now. Sorry I had to jump in with that.

In fact Shivani I have my next question for you. Uh you usually are the first investor in quite a few domains that you venture into and you just mentioned a couple of such names. uh how do you go about evaluating these industries and companies that you invest in? So actually across the last few funds we’ve done it from a very bottomup perspective right so we talk I talked about women oriented consumption this has actually come from analyzing companies thousands and thousands of companies and saying what is that nuance which is very interesting so we don’t look at things from a sectoral perspective we look at things from a thematic perspective because within one sector you can have subsectors with very different business dynamics right so for For example, when we peel the onion on healthcare and healthcare is another one of our core sort of uh verticals, we wanted to back something in the dermatology segment. Why dermatology? And that’s where the investment thematic play comes because dermatology acts like a chronic thing. If you have a skin issue or a hair issue, you will have to keep taking the medicine for a long period of time. The alternative would be let’s say investors investing in you know u cancer drugs and all that which which you know of course happens the the risk with essential medicine is sometimes the government comes in and puts a cap correct with dermatology you don’t have that risk right correct so uh you have the longevity without having that risk on the women oriented consumption because we’ve evaluated thousands of companies we know what is the interesting subsegment to back why did we back lingerie and not fashion Because on the lingerie side you have repeatability, you have predictability of cash flows, you have less returns, your working capitals are much more predictable, right? So within each theme, that’s what we do. Financial services infrastructure is one of our is one of our investment theme. So we were the first private equity fund to invest in TransUnion civil backing the credit uh uptake in the country.

Amazing. Uh now Dina coming to you from the global fund side. So you manage a global fund yourself. Um we have all heard about you know home buyers and we all have it here. Uh just wanted to get your take on how do we balance the uh you know the India longterm growth story with the global uh you know opportunities which are available. How should we do that?

Okay. So let me first start with a couple of personal things. When I started my career the dollar was 12 rupees. So, so it is a 90% depreciation in the course of less than a career. When you’re talking of long-term financial planning of goals which are 10, 20, 30 years away, you cannot forget that the rupee depreciates. You know, there was briefly a talk of gold. Uh gold actually this is data not my opinion is more volatile than equities. If you look at the dollar price of gold, I saw a headline recently that gold has not seen this kind of rally since 1979. I said go forward from 1979 and see what happens. 1980 the dollar price of gold made a high. Uh two decades later in 1999 it was still 60% below that high. It crossed that high 27 years later in 2007. The next high it fell 40%. The dollar uh the gold price in rupees the chart looks fine because it is a rupee depreciation chart. So our grandmothers were not wrong in buying gold because at that time you could not buy any overseas asset other than gold. That was the only hard currency asset you had access to. Now that is not the case. And I’ll tell you why I went global in the first place. Again little bit you know for some people it might be out of history books and which is also an answer to if India is growing so fast why should I look elsewhere? In the 1990s which were the fastest growing economies of the world they were the Asian tigers. India wanted to be an Asian tiger to grow like that and then this came something called an Asian crisis in 9798 in one year in just one single year the currencies fell the markets fell in dollar terms Indonesia fell 90% Indonesian stock market Taiwan fell 50% South Korea Philippines Thailand were between this 50 and 90 and that was a wakeup call for me u and in my city bank days I had spent some months since Indonesia setting up their security subsidiary and I said you know Indonesian to 90% net worth you know so this is that was the wakeup call to go global we went global I mean lately I see a lot of people talking the globe I mean home country bias was not something anybody had heard of when I used started speaking about it two and a half years ago and uh but you know we were not just the first Indian we were the first Asian members of the London stock exchange in 99 other than the Japanese and then NAS ST. So we’ve been following those markets though the complex markets and the globe is not the US. So if you remember the last time there was a boom in in uh in these so-called global funds was in 2021 when there were a number of these NASDAQ ETFs and feeder funds and all that and one year later they were all down 40%. And so you know this is this is not a knee-jerk thing that you do one time and the US again I’m repeating is not the world in the last one and a half years almost we’ve been heavily underweight US it’s still our largest weight but it is we are quite a bit underweight versus the benchmark you have to look at the whole globe because leadership always changes people forget after the tech crash that 2000 high of the NASDAQ was not crossed for 15 years so you need somebody with expertise but over a period of time at least 30 40% of your allocation should be global objectively speaking it should be a lot higher uh but I’m saying at least get there you know it just is uh that is very important otherwise as I said there’s no point saying that you’re planning for something 20 30 years uh hence and forgetting this big whole picture that this is what happens to the rupee and you know this is what you are exposing yourself I mean people who were thinking that I’ll send instead of you know US has become very unwelcoming let me send my child to Europe for college in 2025 alone your college fee bill went up 20%. Rupee depreciated against the euro by 20%. I mean dollar is one been one of the worst performing currencies barring you know very very lately and uh you have been depreciating against that against all other currencies the rupee has depreciated even more. So don’t forget the basics. As I said, get the basics right and you are most of the way through. You don’t have to get the last multibagger.

Thank you Da. Uh we’ve heard Da talk about public equities. We’ve heard Shwani talk about private markets. Lakshmi can’t let you go without answering a question on fixed income. Uh I just wanted your view on how do you think women approach fixed income as an asset class. See, you know, now I the number of companies where I spearhead the investments, I see it from the plain jane fixed deposit to the most exotic AI investment that we ever made. But uh in that I would say um Cinderella never asked for a prince charming. She just asked for a pair of shoes. I think that is what the fixed income industry is telling all investors that look I don’t want to be gang busters in terms of returns. is what I’m going to give you is not steroids, not a Red Bull kind of a kicker effect on your portfolio, but just the stability that you require to ensure that you have enough money to ch change the spare parts of your car. But if you want to upgrade your car from a sedan to an SUV, then that’s not the asset class. I think that is a key messaging which is for fixed income and fixed income is not fixed deposits. I think that is one myth which we need to bust as an industry, as an adviser, as a manufacturer, as an investor. I think that’s very very important because a child in the womb has a bank account but they do not have you know a mutual fund folio which has fixed income investments. So I think that’s very very important to be torchbearer of you know passing on that story but yes it will definitely not be able to beat inflation at any point in time. Yeah situational one odd time it gets lucky but never look at it as a wealth creation engine. It is more of a wealth stability engine is the way I’d leave it. I’ll add quickly to it because I know we’re out of time. Within private equity also you have various different kinds of sort of subasset classes. And because we’re out of time, I’ll take Lakshmi as analogy further. So, if it’s Cinderella wanting the prince charming or pair of shoes uh with mid-market private equity, which is what I do, it’s a comfortable pair of shoes and it’s the kind boy next door who has a lot of potential but is not Prince Charming today. I I I just I just add to something Lakshmi said on fixed income. Do not look at fixed income for uh do not use it to take risk. So you know that it’s not worth getting that instead of 7% I will get 8% in this thing and take a credit risk on it. So your fixed income uh should always be in relatively low risk and not on any single you know not a single bond where you’re taking again a credit risk on a single company. It should always be a pulled form either an ETF or a fund.

So thank you. Thank you Lakshmi Shivani and Dana. Uh let’s open the floor up for a few questions from the audience. Uh we have the first hand right there.

Question when it comes to the um because of the dollar rupee uh depreciation. What do you think of this gift city way of investing for people who don’t want to directly invest in America but do it through a mutual fund via the gift city? See there is gift city just as you know this is uh we didn’t get the time to get into it but asset classes is one thing and structures are different I mean people think that AI if is some kind of asset class no it is just a structure PMS is a structure mutual fund is a structure a gift city also you can have a structure so the importance is not that whether it is via gift city the importance is what is the expertise of the person who or the fund or the institution that is offering that unfortunately I mean this is What I I’m scared of many of those offerings because I know those fund managers have no expertise. Neither have they tried to really build an expertise while they’re saying in interviews they have expertise because those companies are very complex companies. You know investing overseas doesn’t mean investing in the 10 NASDAQ stocks and the five China stocks. You know you have to drill down far deeper. So I mean that is really the question. It is the structure is not the most important thing. The most important thing is the expertise of the people managing it. But you know you have gift city structures which allows and see gift city is largely or only for offshore investments use it as a very kosher structure to deploy money into ETFs outside the country. I think it’s fantastic. I mean again you don’t 80% of the fund managers outside of India especially in the US don’t outperform the index. So you can just buy these and see I think it’ll take forever to India for India to be able to have the tech prowess like what NASDAQ companies are displaying you know we are services oriented uh uh IT companies we don’t really have product ownership or product owned to that magnitude I think I think to use those opportunities via gift structure uh it’s it’s totally worth it I mean if you’re buying ETF you can as well open a brokerage account and buy an ETF however I would advise you again be very careful on the AI focused uh thing. If you look at the se what what are called the magnificent seven the seven major tech stocks in the US they contributed 60% of the S&P 60% plus of the S&P movement in 20 23 50% in 24 in 25 it was 40% but actually only two stocks outperformed Google and Nvidia other five underperformed that bull is tiring and with good reason the first six month first six weeks of the year all seven were down. So you know we always the problem is we drive looking at the rear view. We you know in January is when the inflows into the gold funds exceeded the equity inflows because we drive looking at the road that has gone by and that systematically if you invest in what has done well of late systematically you will underperform. That’s the long-term data. So be very careful. Don’t try to get into a bus or train which has left the station. One of my favorite quotes is by Richard Branson saying, “Opportunities are like buses. There’s always another one coming along. So don’t look at something

I’d like to ask all three of you actually we’re talking of women doing asset allocation we speaking of global diversification in your view what would be an ideal global diversification portfolio what would it look like which are the economies that we must look at so see that changes that’s the whole point that’s why I said US is not the globe because that always changes people think US has always done well or the whole world moves along with the US but that has been the case last 10 12 years look at The period 2003 to 2007 it wasn’t as if US was coming off a high it was already in the doldrums post the tech crash still those four and a half years US did very little what happened emerging markets went up three and a half four times India went up six times Brazil went up 10 times that you know see all the stories are according to what’s happening in the market at that time the story became that US is already over now it is the century of uh these new emerging markets that’s when bricks was coined Now it’s a story of these five uh economies. Uh and once the US started doing well again all the stories were forgotten. So you know that’s the whole point. See any that since I said this asset allocation or you know in a global context it can be country allocation in a fund context it can be uh which sectors you invest in that’s where the most value add is. So that decision you have to leave to the fund manager. That is why I mean as normal investors I would say never try to invest in thematic funds because the most you are paying the fund manager to decide on whether this is the time for small cap or not this is the time to def for defense or PSU or pharma or it if you are trying to make that decision what are you paying the fund manager for so it is the same thing with global that you have to decide the let the fund manager decide like 2025 beginning onwards we have been I mean I’m telling you what we have done we’ve been underweight US we’ve been overweight Europe China we’ve been overweight since 24 lately just in February this is before the conflict started we went further underweight uh US and we put the money in crude and metals so you know that that’s the flexibility and that’s the value added thanks I’d like to know from both of you as well

I think there’s no better time than to be investing in India and I agree with what Dina said look at the fund manager’s expertise right because the biggest challenge that we had in private equity And I’m repeating it but you know I’ll just take a thing from Mahabharat. It used to be like Abi Manu you know coming into the chakra view you would talk about all this great deal that you’ve invested in and you would talk about the mark to market and you know you had frankly no clue how you were going to exit besides praying really hard right now. You have a clue you have many clues how you’re going to exit. So if you have the structural tailwinds with you, you have GDP compounding at massive numbers, you have sub sectors which are very exciting. And I think the biggest change which has happened is the entrepreneur mindset. You have entrepreneurs who are building for scale, who are building big. And you know the other thing that I’m seeing on the ground across sectors people are looking at India as a vast market when in my last fund uh you know I’ll just pick tech as an example. We used to find every tech company used to say I want to become best in India and my ambition is to move to the US and after that I’m going to you know look at the US market. Guess what we’re backing these days? We’re backing entrepreneurs that say, you know what, these two companies have vacated the spot in India. Good for me. And the market is massive here and I’m going to be focusing on India and Southeast Asia. We’re backing that. So, I’ll just add one point, okay, in a lighter vein. Uh, as an Indian passport holder, you have visa fee entry into countries like Vietnam, Montenegro, Bangkok. Uh, go there for a holiday. It’s perfectly fine. uh but if you really want to diversify on a more serious note I would say there are only two formidable uh I would say uh global powers to reckon with one in the west which is uh US no marks for guessing that it will remain the mecca of innovation for the longest time it is indeed a great diversifier but keep in mind that um the core allocations be India because obviously we understand these companies and we are still at a growth stage and China is the next best in Asia so I think these these two countries uh geographically if you want to diversify you know today TSMC uh in MSEI EM index is higher than the weightage of India in totality India is 13% TSMC is higher it’s a Taiwanese company so we may not be able to identify that as humanly impossible uh therefore as I said you know either pick up an index which is an MSI EM basket invest in a fund like that leave it or an S&P or a NASDAQ index and leave it at that because the churn is happening really fast. The revenue drivers are changing really fast and I think these are good effective I would say tailend diversifiers but keep in mind risk risk is significantly high you know from the peak to down uh US markets have corrected less than 5%. Um but China if you see valuations is still even after India’s correction is still about half that of India. So I think those uh valuation games will definitely give you but it’s not going to be like BaskinRobins flavor of the season. You have to have it from a diversifier and a currency diversifier. I think that’s the most important.

Thank you so much ladies.