There is something strange about anniversaries, they make the same moment feel like yesterday and a lifetime ago at once. As I sit down to write this, I find myself thinking about where it all began: a small office in Mumbai, Vaibhav, Sahil and I, three people who had spent their careers inside wealth management, with a deep conviction that the future of this industry would be built on technology rails with the client at the centre of every decision. But none of us came from a technology background.

We did not know exactly how we would get there. But we knew it was the future, and that India’s wealth creators deserved better than what they were getting.

Five years later, that small office has become a team of 550-plus people across five cities, managing over Rs 16,000 crore for 6,800 wealth creators who trust us with their portfolios. 

This newsletter is my attempt to write honestly about what those five years actually felt like, the apprehensions before we began, the years where progress felt invisible, what we learned about building a team, about which problems to solve when everything felt urgent, and the one thing every aspiring founder underestimates. I hope some of it stays with you.

In this edition:

• One non-negotiable decision before taking the first step
• What the early years of building actually felt like from the inside
• How we found the people who built Dezerv with us
• What five years of showing up looks like in numbers
• Five things I have learned as an entrepreneur, a team leader, and a wealth manager
• Three things I would tell anyone thinking about quitting their job to build something

Let’s begin.

Before we let go of the wall

There is a moment, just before a child takes their first steps, where they are holding on to something. Not quite ready to let go. That pause is not hesitation. It is the weight of understanding, however instinctively, that once you release your grip, nothing will be quite the same again.

I lived in that pause for a while before Dezerv began.

The apprehension I carried going in was not really about whether the business would work. It was more personal: what is the implication for my family if this does not work? Because individually, I could always find a way through. But there is a lot of responsibility sitting quietly behind every decision you make as a founder. And if you do not address that directly before you begin, it follows you into every room.

So before I took any of the external steps of building a company, I did the internal work first. The portfolio got restructured during those months. Simpler, more disciplined, oriented toward stability rather than complexity. Because here is what I understood then and believe even more firmly now: if the family is secure, you can take the risks this journey demands. If the family is insecure, you are always leaning over your shoulder. And you cannot build anything worth building while leaning over your shoulder.

There is something I find meaningful about this, especially given what Dezerv is. The first act of building a wealth management company was getting my own financial house in order. Making sure that the people I was responsible for would be protected regardless of what happened next. The alignment between what we preach and what we practise starts there, at the very beginning, before anyone was watching.

The first year and the biggest challenge 

A newborn does not arrive with instructions. You figure it out as you go, with whatever combination of instinct and will you can assemble. Year one of Dezerv felt something like that.

We had a clear conviction about the problem. But conviction is not a company. The first real challenge was not finding clients. It was finding the right people to build with.

The three of us who started Dezerv came from wealth management. But we had made a non-negotiable bet that the next serious wealth manager in India would be built on technology rails. The problem was that none of us had ever operated in a technology environment. We knew it was a mega trend. We believed it was the future. But when you ask yourself where you actually begin, the honest answer is that you do not know. So the decision we made was simple: stop trying to figure it out ourselves and invest everything in finding the people who already had the answers.

But convincing people to join turned out to require something more specific than a pitch about the opportunity. There is a real difference between offering someone a business idea to chase and offering them a vision to believe in. A lot of talented people get asked to chase business ideas. Very few get asked to chase a vision.

What worked for us was being brutally transparent about the human story underneath what we were building. So in the early days, we focused on hiring missionaries, not mercenaries. Mercenaries do excellent work when conditions are favourable. Missionaries stay when conditions are not, because the mission means more to them than the circumstances. The valuation, the outcome, the money,  all of that is secondary in the hard moments.

So for us, repeatedly talking about the vision, not once in a founding document but constantly, became the most important thing we did as founders.

Learning to walk : How we figured out what to build first 

Around age two, a child starts walking. What you see from the outside looks like progress. What is actually happening is hundreds of small falls, constant recalibration, the slow invisible accumulation of balance that will eventually make walking feel effortless. 

Between years two and four of Dezerv, progress felt invisible in exactly that way. I have come to think of this as the zone of frustration, and I believe it is where most serious building journeys either hold or break.

What made the difference was learning to separate signals from noise.

When you work inside a large organisation, the organisation insulates you from a lot of this. There is always somebody telling you what matters. As a founder, all of that scaffolding disappears overnight. You have to build the filter entirely on your own. And in building it, there is an enormous amount of noise you encounter. It is very easy to drift away from your core mission without even realising it is happening.

Initially, you tend to react to everything. Then you realise that reacting to everything is counterproductive. The first shift is simply appreciating that 99% of what you hear is noise. The signal is rare. 

The second shift is developing a test for what survives that filter. The question I kept coming back to was this: is what I am seeing a permanent shift, or a temporary adjustment? An investor says no, but what is the actual reason? If the reason is temporary, you note it and keep moving. If there is something genuinely fundamental in what they are saying, you sit with it seriously. That distinction, applied consistently under pressure, is one of the harder and more valuable things I have learned.

From first steps to full stride: How far we’ve come

Watch a four year old and you will notice something. They do not just walk anymore. Everything is a run. The uncertainty of the early steps is gone, replaced by a kind of joyful momentum that looks almost reckless from the outside but is actually the product of thousands of hours of quiet practice finally clicking into place.

By year four, Dezerv felt something like that.

Clients who had joined us early were referring to people they trusted. In wealth management, that is the only signal that truly matters. The moment someone calls a friend and says, these are the people I trust with my money. You cannot manufacture that. You can only earn it, repeatedly, through how you show up week after week.

Today Dezerv manages over Rs 16,000 crore in assets across AIF, PMS, and Distribution. Over 6,800 wealth creators trust us with their portfolios. Our team of 550-plus people works across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Pune. This is what genuine commitment looks like when it is repeated for five years.

To someone thinking about leaving a stable career to build something

The first is that if the idea is genuinely bothering you, the discomfort of not trying will outlast the discomfort of trying. The version of yourself that never attempted the thing you believed in will carry that weight in ways that are hard to anticipate from the outside. I believe deeply in what Bezos called regret minimisation,  the simple practice of asking which version of yourself, at the end of things, you can live with. For most serious people who have a serious idea, the answer points in one direction.

Before you take the leap, do the work to secure the people who depend on you. Not out of fear, but because the boldness that building requires is simply not available to someone carrying unresolved anxiety about the people they love. That clarity is not caution. It is the foundation for real courage.

And finally, these are long journeys. Not a few hard years followed by some settled phase where things get easier. Decades of compounded effort, where the early decisions echo for years and the values you hold at the beginning either prove true or prove hollow under the pressure of growth. The people who build something lasting are not the ones who pushed through the hard parts of willpower. They are the ones who fell in love with the process itself.

Thank you for growing with us

None of what Dezerv has built happened because of a plan on paper. It happened because thousands of people extended their trust before the evidence fully justified it.

The clients who came early, when we had conviction but no track record. The team members who chose the mission over certainty. The partners, Premji Invest, Elevation Capital, Z47, and Accel, who believed at stages when belief required more than evidence could support.

Trust in this business is not something you earn once. It is something you earn continuously, through every newsletter, every portfolio review, every conversation that starts with a client’s real question rather than a product pitch. That is the work we signed up for. It remains the most meaningful work I have done.

Five years in. A long way still to go.

It’s March 2020. Your portfolio is down 38% in three weeks. The news is apocalyptic. Your WhatsApp groups are cycling between pandemic updates and screenshots of portfolios bleeding red. You’re a smart person, CXO, founder, someone who has navigated genuinely complex situations before. You look at the number on your screen and you make a decision that feels, in that moment, like the only rational one.

You pause your SIP.

Eighteen months later, the Nifty hasn’t just recovered. It’s at an all-time high. You’ve missed a 100% rally from the bottom, waiting for the “right moment” to get back in, which never quite announced itself clearly enough.

This story has played out, with different dates and different crises, in almost every investor’s journey. It happened in 2008, it happened in 2013, in 2016, and again in 2020. The years change but the feeling doesn’t. And the cost, invisible, unmeasured, never appearing on any statement, compounds for decades.

DALBAR, a research firm that has spent thirty years studying investor behaviour across market cycles, has documented a finding that is both simple and uncomfortable: the average equity fund investor consistently earns roughly 4% less than the market, every single year. 

Not in one bad cycle. Every year, for three decades. Compounded across twenty years, that gap does not look like 4%. It looks like the difference between having three times your money and having seven times your money. In India, the Nifty 500 has delivered a 14% CAGR over the last twenty years, a 15x multiple on invested capital. But most investors walked away with something closer to single digits.

The question that should stay with you is: why? These aren’t people who don’t understand investing. Many of them understand it deeply. The gap between knowing and doing is where the real story lives.

In this edition

• Why the 14% return is real yet nobody actually lives through it
• How intelligent people reason their way into the worst investing decisions
• What the market’s own valuation data has been telling us for decades
• The honest cost of choosing a smoother ride over maximum returns
• One question that determines more than any fund you will ever pick

Let’s begin.

It’s the behaviour problem: How intelligent people make the most expensive mistake in investing

Only 3.8% of one-year periods in Nifty 500 history deliver returns close to the long-term average. In 96% of years, returns are either much higher or much lower, which means the 14% only becomes visible over decades and in any single year, it doesn’t feel like 14% at all.

What it actually feels like is this. Out of roughly 290 months over the last 25 years, 119 ended in the red, which is your portfolio showing a loss once every two and a half months, without fail, across the entire run, including the years that ended strongly. 

And in every single one of the last 26 years, the market saw a meaningful correction at some point, with the average fall from peak to trough sitting at 15% and three of those years seeing drops that exceeded 30%.

Most investors are not truly prepared for this. They understand it intellectually but experience it emotionally, one month at a time, and those are two very different things. So when the screen goes red and stays red, the natural response is not to panic but to think, to read, to assess, and to arrive at a careful and well-reasoned conclusion that stepping back for now makes sense. 

That process feels exactly like good judgment, and in many ways it is. The investors who exited in 2008 had genuinely sound reasoning behind their decision, and so did the ones who moved to cash in March 2020. The situations were real, the fear was justified, and every credible voice around them seemed to agree.

The problem was never the reasoning. It was the timing. Markets recover long before things feel safe. And by the time confidence returns, the best months are already behind you.

That is where the gap lives. The 14% is not built from years of steady, comfortable growth. A disproportionate share of it comes from a handful of sharp recovery periods that arrive right after the worst of the falls. Missing those months, because you were waiting for a cleaner signal, is the single most expensive thing an investor can do.

The investors who collected the 14% were not smarter or better prepared. They were simply still there.

Why you shouldn’t sell in panic during  falling markets

What the market has been telling us all along is actually very simple. There is a clear signal in the Nifty’s valuation that most investors can see but rarely act on: what you earn depends a lot on when you buy.

Every time in history that the Nifty’s PE has been between 10 and 15, returns in the following year have been above 14%. That is where the 100% probability comes from. But look closer at those instances and the picture gets more interesting. The typical outcome, sitting right in the middle of the distribution, was around 47%. The range ran from about 20% on the weaker end to 92% on the stronger end, with most instances clustering much closer to the middle.  That 92% was an outlier, likely a sharp rebound year. 

When PE goes above 25, the picture changes completely. The median return drops to around -6%, deep negative outcomes start appearing, and the probability of earning above 14% falls to 26%.

The pattern is clear in hindsight and hard to act on in real time, for the simple reason that a PE of 10 to 15 almost never arrives without a serious market fall attached to it.

That is because low PEs usually show up when markets have fallen sharply, when news is negative and people are pulling money out of equities. High PEs show up when markets have already done well and confidence is high. So the time that offers the best future returns feels the most uncomfortable, and the time that feels the safest tends to offer weaker outcomes.

Most investors respond to how things feel rather than what the data says, reducing or stopping their investments when markets fall and adding more when markets have already risen. Now this is an entirely natural way to behave, but it leads to doing exactly the opposite of what works.

The implication is not to predict markets or wait for the perfect entry point. It is something much simpler and, for most people, much harder to actually do: keep investing even when markets fall. The SIPs that continued through 2008, 2016 and 2020 bought more units at lower prices and captured the full benefit of the recovery that followed. The ones that paused during those same periods reduced long-term outcomes, not because the funds failed, but because they were stopped at exactly the wrong time.

What if you genuinely cannot handle the volatility?

At some point in any honest conversation about equity, the right question comes up. What if I genuinely cannot hold through a 20% drawdown? What if the volatility does not just make me uncomfortable but actually causes me to make decisions I later regret? This deserves a direct answer rather than a dismissal, because it is a fair and  legitimate concern.

The worst outcome in investing is not earning a conservative return. It is being fully allocated to equity on paper and then selling near the bottom twice in a decade. That pattern, which is far more common than it should be, underperforms even the most cautious blended portfolio across a long horizon.

If you know yourself well enough to know you will not hold through serious corrections, a blended portfolio of equity, debt, and gold is the more honest answer. A balanced portfolio has historically seen fewer negative years than an all-equity one, the difference is roughly one bad year per decade versus two.

But the cost of that choice is not small, and it’s worth understanding clearly. 

Historically, blending debt into an all-equity portfolio has come with a modest return trade-off, around 3% per year.  Over a long period, that difference adds up to roughly four extra years needed to reach the same goal. That could mean four more years of working, or depending on an income for longer than you planned. This is not a theoretical gap, it directly affects when you can stop and what you’re able to build.

Gold is often underestimated in this discussion. Over the last 21 years, it has delivered returns similar to equities, slightly higher in some periods, while also helping protect purchasing power as the rupee weakens over time. For anyone investing over decades, that matters. So the role of gold is not just to reduce volatility, the return data supports having some allocation to it.

In the end, the choice between full equity and a mixed portfolio is not about right or wrong. It is a choice between two types of discomfort. One is dealing with volatility every year. The other is reaching your goals a few years later. The right answer depends on which one you can live with, and whether you can stick with your portfolio when markets become difficult.

One question worth answering honestly

Before allocation percentages, before fund selection, before tax optimisation, there is one question that determines more about your actual outcome than any of those decisions combined. 

If your portfolio were down 20% six months from now,  which is, as we have seen, a completely normal year in Indian equity and not a crisis — would you keep your SIP going? Would you treat that fall as a slightly better price on the same long-run future?

If the answer is yes, the path is clear: stay in equity, treat corrections as the market offering you a better entry point, and, if monthly portfolio checks are what trigger emotional decisions, stop looking so often. The discipline of checking less is underrated.

If the answer is no, build the blended portfolio with full awareness of what that choice costs, and then hold that portfolio through thick and thin. Because discipline applied to a conservative allocation still compounds. The 3% CAGR you give up is a real and measurable cost. Selling near the bottom is a permanent one.

One more thing before the allocation conversation begins. 

Get the non-negotiables right first. Have health insurance in place before you start investing in equity, because one large hospital bill can undo years of savings in a single moment. Take term life cover if you have dependents or loans. And avoid borrowing for things that lose value. A car loan at 9% on something that is steadily depreciating is simply money leaving your future self every month. These are not glamorous decisions, but they are the foundation everything else depends on.

In summary

The gap between what the market delivered and what most investors actually earned has nothing to do with which funds they picked. It came down to what they did when things got uncomfortable. Whether they kept going or stepped back. Whether they treated a falling market as a reason to stop or a reason to stay.

The data is unambiguous on this. The investors who kept their SIPs running through 2008, through the flat years of the 2010s, through March 2020, did not do anything sophisticated. They just did not stop. And that single decision, to keep going when everything around them said pause, is what separated their outcome from everyone else’s.

Markets will always give you a reason to wait. A correction, a crisis, a valuation concern, a macro headwind. There will always be a compelling, well-reasoned case for stepping back right now. The behaviour gap exists precisely because that case always sounds sensible in the moment and always costs you something in the long run.

Consistency is not a personality trait. It is a strategy. And over twenty years, it is the only one that has reliably worked.

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, advertising, or providing any financial or investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments.  The past performance is not indicative of future performance. Such past performance may or may not be sustained in future. Any statements about future developments are speculative and should not be taken as guarantees. Readers are advised to consult with their financial advisor before making investment decisions based on the information provided herein.

In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used information developed in-house and publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. The information is not a complete disclosure of every material fact and terms and conditions. While reasonable care has been made to present reliable data in this article, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data. The information / data herein alone is not sufficient and shouldn’t be used for the development or implementation of an investment strategy.

Any references to names of investment securities, or asset classes are for illustrative purposes only. Dezerv, along with its directors, employees, or partners or any of its affiliates, shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or liability arising from the use of this document. Additionally, all trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification purposes only. The use of these names, trademarks, and logos does not imply endorsement or recommendation.

The weeks that followed were disorienting for everyone who knew him. But somewhere beneath the grief, a very practical question began to surface,  one that his family had to face whether they were ready to or not.

How long could they sustain that life? And unlike most families where expenses can be trimmed in a crisis, this family’s most significant costs were non-negotiable. The income was gone. The obligations remained. I have thought about that family a great deal since. Not just in sadness, but in the unsettling recognition that what they are facing is a concentrated, accelerated version of a question most of us never properly answer.

If your income stopped tomorrow, how long could your life continue?

In this edition:

• Why income loss is more common than we think.
• Understanding why sudden income disruption and retirement are structurally the same financial problem.
• The real cost of living: How 6% inflation doubles your expenses every 12 years.
• The ₹100 Crore reality check
• The SRP Framework: How to calculate your three most critical numbers
• Practical steps to strengthen your financial structure so it survives even when the income engine stalls.

Income loss comes in many forms

Every SIP you run, every EMI you service, every insurance premium you pay, every goal you save for. All of it is powered by one thing. The money that lands in your account every month. Take that away, and everything downstream breaks. Not slowly. Suddenly.

And income can stop for more reasons than most of us want to think about.

The death of a primary earner is the most extreme version. But it is not the only one. A cancer diagnosis that sidelines you for two years. A business that fails and takes personal savings with it. A layoff in a restructuring. Financial fraud. A divorce that splits assets and creates new liabilities. Even the slow version counts. An industry that shrinks. Earning power that drops 40% without anyone noticing.

None of these are rare. All of them land on households designed for continuity, for income flowing month after month, indefinitely. The disruption reveals that most of us built for the expected scenario, not the realistic range.

So the question is not whether disruption can happen. It is whether your financial architecture can survive it.

Why income disruption and retirement planning are structurally the same problem?

Most people dramatically underestimate how long their money needs to last. Average life expectancy in India has crossed 71 years. For anyone retiring at 60 in reasonable health, planning to 71 is dangerously optimistic. The realistic planning horizon is 25 to 30 years, and for a couple, it’s longer still.

For a couple at 85, there is a 71% probability that at least one person reaches 85. A 44% probability that at least one reaches 90. That is not a statistical tail risk,  that is a near-certain 20 to 25 year financial obligation beyond retirement.

The implication is significant. A couple planning retirement together should plan for the longer of their two life expectancies, not the average, and not the individual. Planning for the average means half the population runs out of money while still alive.

This is why income disruption and retirement planning are structurally the same problem. The question is identical: how does a finite corpus meet rising expenses over a long and uncertain timeline, without being exhausted before the obligation ends?

Then there is inflation 

What does inflation actually do to your runway?

Two things are certain in life: death and taxes. What’s less certain is when the first arrives, and how ruinously expensive the wait will be.  The assumption that derails most financial plans is treating expenses as roughly stable. They are not. They compound, and they compound faster than most people expect.

At 6% annual inflation,  a reasonable baseline for Indian household expenses, your monthly requirement roughly doubles every 12 years. What costs ₹1,50,000 per month today will cost approximately ₹4,81,000 per month in 20 years:

Healthcare is a separate and more severe curve. Hospital services have historically grown far faster than general inflation. In India, medical costs have risen at 12 to 15% annually for years. And critically, healthcare’s share of household spending increases with age: from around 8.6% of income at ages 55-64, rising to over 13.2% at 65 and beyond,  and continuing to climb.

They compound faster than almost any other household expense, and they are among the least reducible in a crisis. The practical consequence: the corpus that appears adequate when calculated in today’s rupees may be seriously inadequate in the rupees of 15 or 20 years from now. 

The retirement corpus reality check

Assume you are 45 today. You plan to retire at 60. Healthcare and lifestyle inflation runs at 10% annually. The question is not how much you have, it is how much you will need at 60 to sustain your current lifestyle for 30 years:

A ₹5 lakh monthly lifestyle today needs roughly ₹100 crore at the starting line of retirement. Not to grow wealthy. Not to leave a legacy. Just to not run out. The number is achievable. Not through luck or extraordinary returns. Through one variable that most people are squandering every year they wait. Time.

Consider this exercise. Same starting corpus of ₹1 crore. Same target of ₹20 crore. The only thing that changes is when you begin.

Waiting 10 years multiplies the required monthly SIP by 13 times. And the SIP hockey stick below shows why,  the last decade of compounding generates more wealth than the first two combined:

Note: This is for illustrative purposes only

The first twenty years of investing build 24% of the final corpus. The last ten years build the remaining 76%. When you delay by a decade, you are not just losing ten years of growth. You are cutting yourself off from the only part of the curve that was going to do the real work.

How to think about your portfolio in a disruption

A portfolio that looks adequate on paper can behave very differently when withdrawals begin early, markets are down, or an unexpected expense lands at the wrong moment.

If your portfolio drops 20% and you simultaneously withdraw 10% — which income disruption forces you to do, you now need a 39% gain just to return to where you started. You have not just lost money. You have permanently shrunk the base from which recovery has to happen.

The instinct is to de-risk, move to fixed income, play it safe. That instinct is historically backwards. Over 90% of portfolio return variability is explained by asset allocation alone, not fund selection or market timing.

Note: This is for illustrative purposes only

Conservative versus Growth: same market, same timeline, three times the outcome.
The person who played it safe did not protect themselves, they chose a different kind of risk. The slow, quiet risk of a corpus that cannot outpace inflation and runs out while they are still alive. For any long-horizon investor, voluntary retirement at 60 or forced disruption at 44,  the real risk is not short-term volatility. It is outliving the corpus.

The SRP framework: Three numbers every family should know

Most people ask: ‘Do I have enough?’ But enough for what? Enough for retirement? Enough if something goes wrong? Enough if I need to protect my family for 40 years? These are different questions. They need different numbers. Here is a cleaner way to think about it,  three numbers, each answering a different question:

Where most families actually stand

Based on portfolio reviews at Dezerv, this is what we typically find:

Most families are exposed to all three simultaneously. The Survival Number is dangerously thin. The Replacement Ratio is nowhere near the target. And the Protection gap is large enough that a single event would change the family’s financial trajectory permanently.

Building the Chassis

You cannot prevent income loss. That is often outside your control. But you can build a financial structure strong enough to survive it,  a chassis that holds even when the engine fails. Most people over-invest in the engine and under-invest in the chassis. A ₹1.5 crore per year earner with ₹80 lakh in savings and a ₹1.2 crore home loan has a powerful engine on a fragile frame.
One shock and the whole vehicle breaks.

1. Fund your survival number first: Financial experts often suggest maintaining a survival corpus equal to 24 months of household expenses in highly liquid assets. This is not an investment. It is a shock absorber. It buys you time to think clearly instead of selling in panic.

2. Fix your protection number: Many households choose to evaluate their life cover to ensure it adequately bridges the gap between their assets and future liabilities. It is the cheapest way to ensure the hockey stick survives even if you do not. Add critical illness cover. Being alive but unable to earn for two years is financially more devastating than death.

3. Build your replacement ratio deliberately: Your Replacement Number should climb every year. Dividends, rental yield from REITs, systematic withdrawal plans. The goal is that by 55, your portfolio can generate 70% of your expenses without your salary.

4. Have the conversation with your spouse: Do they know where the assets are? Who is the advisor? Can they access accounts? Is there a documented plan they can follow? This is not glamorous. It is life saving.

5. Diversify your concentration risk: If your income and your largest asset are both tied to the same company, through salary and ESOPs, a single corporate event can destroy both simultaneously. Diversify before the shock. Not after.

In summary

The ₹100 crore retirement number assumes you show up at 60 with a fully funded portfolio. It assumes 15 to 20 years of uninterrupted compounding. It assumes the engine never stalls.

For most of us, that assumption will hold. For some of us, it will not. Nobody knows which group they are in. The goal is not to prevent income loss. That is often outside your control. The goal is to build a financial life that can coast long enough for the engine to restart, or for a new one to take its place. Calculate your three numbers. Fix the gaps while you still have the income to close them. The most important financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s not about earning more. 

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, advertising, or providing any financial or investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments. Any illustrations, charts, or compounding graphs shown are for illustration purpose and do not in any manner offer any assured returns and are subject to market risks. Any statements about future developments are speculative and should not be taken as guarantees. Readers are advised to consult with their financial advisor before making investment decisions based on the information provided herein.

In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used information developed in-house and publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. The information is not a complete disclosure of every material fact and terms and conditions. While reasonable care has been made to present reliable data in this article, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data. The information / data herein alone is not sufficient and shouldn’t be used for the development or implementation of an investment strategy.

Any references to names of fund houses, investment securities, or asset classes are for illustrative purposes only. Dezerv, along with its directors, employees, or partners or any of its affiliates, shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or liability arising from the use of this document. Additionally, all trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification purposes only. The use of these names, trademarks, and logos does not imply endorsement or recommendation.

And by January 2nd, most of those resolutions are already forgotten.

I have never understood this. Not because I have anything against celebrations. But because for anyone who builds something, runs something, earns something, or invests something in India, the real year does not start on January 1st. It starts on April 1st.

Think about it. Your salary resets on April 1st. Your tax year resets. Your company files its books by March 31st. Your appraisal cycle turns. Your bonus gets calculated. Every single financial event that actually shapes your life is indexed to the financial year. Not the calendar year.

Yet we pop champagne on January 1st and sleepwalk into April 1st like it is just another Monday. We ignore the date where everything that funds our lives, measures our progress, and determines our financial trajectory actually resets.

In a world obsessed with CYs, I want you to think in FYs.

This is the essay I wish someone had written for me twenty years ago. A case for treating April 1st as the most important day of your year.

As we step into a new financial year in 3 days, I want to challenge you to reframe how you look at the next twelve months.

In this edition, we will cover:

• The Personal P&L: Why tracking just your salary is a strategic error.
• The Balance Sheet You Never Made: Accounting for your hidden, off balance sheet risks.
• Opex Life vs. Capex Life: The single ratio that defines wealth creation.
• The Wealth Pursuits Matrix: A framework to audit how you manage your money.
• The One Capex Resolution: How to approach this April 1st differently.

Let us begin.

The Wrong New Year

Think about the sheer cognitive dissonance of the modern Indian professional. We spend December planning our personal lives and March stressing over our professional and financial realities.

By the time the financial year actually closes, we are too exhausted by tax season, board meetings, and performance reviews to step back and reflect. We survive March, breathe a sigh of relief in April, and let the cycle repeat.

What most people miss is that April 1st is the blank slate you have been waiting for.

It is the moment the counters reset to zero. The allowances refresh, the tax limits open up, and the structural design of your wealth for the next 365 days is established. If you are going to change the trajectory of your net worth, this is the window to do it.

To do that effectively, you need to stop viewing your personal finances as a collection of bank accounts and start treating yourself as an enterprise.

If Your Life Were a Company

Stay with me on this analogy. It is more useful than it sounds.

Every company, at the end of its financial year, produces two documents. A Profit and Loss statement that shows how it performed during the year. And a Balance Sheet that shows where it stands at the end of it. One measures flow. The other measures stock.

Most people, even very successful people, have never built either of these for their own lives. They have a vague sense of how the year went. They know their salary. They roughly know their expenses. They have a feeling about whether things got better or worse. But feelings are not financials. And a company that ran on feelings would not survive a single board meeting.

So here is what I would suggest. Before FY25 ends and FY26 begins, sit down and build your personal P&L.

Your Top Line

This is not just your salary. Your top line is everything you earned this year. Salary. Bonuses. Capital gains. Rental income. ESOP vestings. Freelance income. Interest. Dividends. The total productive output of your financial life in FY25.

Most people dramatically undercount this number because they only think in terms of monthly salary credit. But your top line is far more interesting than your CTC. It is the truest measure of your economic engine.

Your Bottom Line

Now subtract everything. EMIs. Lifestyle expenses. Insurance premiums. Taxes. School fees. Subscriptions. The annual holiday. The things you bought and have already forgotten about.

What is left? Did you run a surplus or a deficit?

And if you ran a surplus, where did it go? Into assets that will compound? Or into a savings account earning 3.5% while inflation ran at 4.5%? Because a surplus that sits in a low yield account is not a surplus. It is a slow leak. Your P&L might say you made money. Your balance sheet might say you quietly lost it.

A company that consistently grows its top line but cannot improve its bottom line has a cost problem. The same applies to you. And the first step to fixing it is seeing it clearly, which most people never do because they never build the statement.

The Balance Sheet You Never Made

Once you understand your cash flow, you have to look at your balance sheet.

Most wealth creators know their portfolio value, their real estate equity, and their outstanding mortgage. But that is only half the picture. A complete personal balance sheet has four quadrants. Two show up on your bank statements. Two never do, but matter just as much.

The alternative balance sheet 

Financial Assets: The Capital Engine

Your core compounding portfolio. Business equity and ESOPs. Yield generating real estate. Strategic liquidity held not out of fear but out of optionality.

The honest question: did this engine grow in FY25 in real terms? After inflation at 4.5%, after taxes, after fees? A 10% headline return quietly becomes 4% once you strip those out. That is the number that matters.

Financial Liabilities: The Capital Drain

Debt is the obvious one. The dangerous ones are the liabilities you have normalised.

Illiquid deadweight: The real estate that generates no yield, has barely appreciated, and cannot be exited without a year long process. It sits on your balance sheet as an “asset” but behaves like a liability because it locks up capital that could be compounding elsewhere.

Structural opex creep: The lifestyle upgrades that quietly became permanent line items. The subscriptions, the club memberships, the second car. None are wrong individually. Collectively, they raise your baseline cost of living every year. A company would call this cost structure bloat. You should too.

Psychological and Human Assets: The Off Balance Sheet Advantage

These never appear on a bank statement. They are often the most valuable things you own.

Social capital: The relationships that open doors and create opportunities. Not networking for networking’s sake. The compound interest of trust built over decades.

Access: The ability to get into rooms, deals, and conversations that most people cannot. A pre IPO allocation. An introduction to a top fund manager. Access compounds, but only if you invest in maintaining it.

Skill capital: Expertise that increases your earning power over time. A new skill with a long half life, like understanding AI, is an appreciating asset. A skill becoming obsolete is a depreciating one.

Time autonomy: The most undervalued asset of all. The ability to choose how you spend your time. A founder who has built a team that operates without them has more time autonomy than a CXO chained to back to back meetings. Time autonomy is what converts money into quality of life.

Psychological Liabilities: The Energy Drain

These are the silent killers.

Decision fatigue: Managing a fragmented portfolio across five brokerage accounts, three insurance policies, and two PMS providers. Each micro decision feels small. Cumulatively, they drain the bandwidth you need for the decisions that actually matter.

Accidental portfolio: Most affluent Indians do not have a portfolio. They have an accumulation. A mutual fund the banker recommended. A stock a colleague tipped. A ULIP bought for tax saving in 2015 and never reviewed. This is not diversification. It is a liability disguised as one.

Contingent family risks: The estate plan that does not exist. The health insurance is not re-looked at since your income tripled. The aging parents whose medical costs are unplanned. In corporate finance, contingent liabilities can sink a company. These are yours.

The golden handcuff stress: Being trapped in a high paying role you have outgrown because your lifestyle depends on the income. Your salary is high. Your optionality is zero. 

Net Worth = Assets minus Liabilities. Not just in rupees. In life.

Map yourself onto this framework. Be honest about what sits where. Because wealth creators often build massive financial assets while simultaneously accumulating off balance sheet risks that can wipe out their hard earned wealth

Opex Life vs. Capex Life

This brings us to the philosophical core of wealth creation.

Every decision you make with your time and money falls into one of two categories: Opex (Operational Expenditure) or Capex (Capital Expenditure).

An Opex life is one where your resources are entirely consumed within the current period. You spend money to maintain your current lifestyle. You spend time managing daily fires. The value is generated and immediately exhausted.

A Capex life is fundamentally different. It involves allocating resources today to build capacity for tomorrow. Capex decisions depreciate slowly and compound quietly over time.

A luxury vacation is Opex. Upgrading to the latest smartphone every year is Opex. Mindlessly scrolling through market news to feel productive is psychological Opex.

Setting up an automated, low cost investment system is Capex. Spending premium fees to hire a top tier tax consultant to restructure your holdings is Capex. Investing in your physical health through a disciplined routine is Capex.

The difference between wealth consumers and wealth creators is simply their Capex to Opex ratio.

The question is not whether you are spending your money and time. The question is whether your spending will show up as an asset on next year’s balance sheet, or if it will vanish the moment the financial year closes.

The Wealth Pursuits Matrix

To help you increase your Capex ratio, we need to audit how you interact with your financial life.

Recently, I was looking at how highly successful founders choose to spend their time. I adapted a framework that perfectly illustrates how you should approach your wealth management duties.

I call it the Wealth Pursuits Matrix.

Most affluent professionals trap themselves in the bottom half of this matrix. They try to manage every granular detail of their wealth, assuming that control equals safety. It does not. It just equals exhaustion. And exhaustion is Opex.

One Capex Resolution

This April 1st, I suggest we skip the traditional, generic resolutions. Do not make a list of ten things you want to change about your budget.

Instead, make one Capex resolution.

Choose one single action that requires upfront effort or capital today, which will not necessarily pay off this quarter, but will compound massively over the next decade.

It could be consolidating your fragmented, legacy portfolio into a single, cohesive strategy. It could be finally drafting your estate plan and setting up a family trust. It could be moving yourself out of the Zone of Excellence by fully delegating your wealth management to an institutional team, freeing up 20 hours a month.

But it does not have to be financial.

It could be booking the comprehensive health checkup you have postponed for three years. It could be having the honest conversation with your spouse about money, goals, and what you actually want from the next decade. It could be building a system that buys back ten hours of your week so you can redeploy that time toward your Zone of Genius.

Capex is not just about money. It is about any decision that creates an asset on next year’s balance sheet.

Make that one commitment. Execute it in April.

Happy New Financial Year.

May your top line grow. May your bottom line grow faster. And may your balance sheet, the real one, the one that includes your health, your time, your relationships, and your freedom, be stronger on March 31st, 2027, than it is today.

Make this the year your Capex finally outweighs your Opex.

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, advertising, or providing any financial or investment advice. Readers are advised to consult with their financial advisor before making investment decisions based on the information provided herein.

In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used information developed in-house and publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. Dezerv, along with its directors, employees, or partners or any of its affiliates, shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or liability arising from the use of this document. Additionally, all trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification purposes only. The use of these names, trademarks, and logos does not imply endorsement or recommendation.

A hundred and two years later, the Agnellis still own Juventus. Four generations. Through two world wars, fascism, corporate scandals, a billion-dollar inheritance dispute, and the complete reinvention of the automobile industry. Fiat merged into Stellantis. Brands came and went. But Juventus endured, and became the emotional anchor of the dynasty. The family’s net worth today is estimated at $20 billion. The club has won 36 league titles.

Now here’s what I find fascinating. The same year Edoardo Agnelli bought Juventus, the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh,  was doing something remarkably similar eight thousand kilometres away. He was funding India’s cricket tours to England, maintaining polo teams that drew over 150,000 spectators, and using sports patronage to build political influence with the British. 

In 1910, after an Indian revolutionary assassinated a British official, Bhupinder Singh financed and personally captained the All India Cricket Tour of 1911 to England, using a sports team as a diplomatic instrument.

Sports ownership as a vehicle for power, wealth, and legacy isn’t a 21st century invention. Indian families were among the world’s earliest practitioners. What’s changed is the scale, the economics, and who gets to participate.

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• Why sports franchises are quietly outperforming traditional asset classes
• India’s 130-year history of sports ownership — from maharajas to billionaires
• How India’s ultra-wealthy are building global sports empires
• The revenue engine behind every franchise
• Why a family from Indore now co-owns a sports team with Amitabh Bachchan

Let’s dive in.

India’s original sports franchise owners

Most people trace Indian sports franchise ownership to 2008 and the launch of the IPL.
The real story starts much earlier.

By the late 1800s, Indian maharajas had turned sports patronage into a sophisticated tool of power. The Maharaja of Natore in Bengal recruited cricketers from across India to build a squad capable of beating the Patiala side — essentially India’s first franchise rivalry, fuelled by inter-princely competition. 

Ranjitsinhji, the Maharaja of Nawanagar, played for England against Australia in 1896 — a prince who used sporting excellence on foreign soil to build personal brand and political leverage. The Ranji Trophy is named after him. 

The Maharajas of Jodhpur, Jaipur, and Patiala maintained polo teams as extensions of their royal identity; the Indian Polo Association, established in 1892, was one of the country’s earliest formal sports bodies, entirely driven by princely wealth.

After independence, the baton passed to industrialists. Sir Dorabji Tata single-handedly funded India’s first Olympic contingent to Antwerp in 1920 and the second to Paris in 1924. He became the first president of the Indian Olympic Association. The Tata Sports Club, established in 1937, produced players for India’s gold-winning Olympic hockey teams. Cricketers like Ravi Shastri, Dilip Vengsarkar, and Sourav Ganguly all played for Tata-backed teams.

The corporate teams that followed — at Tata, Railways, Air India — were proto-franchises: they employed players, built stadiums (Tata Sons helped fund the construction of Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai), and proved that sports could be a vehicle for brand identity and national influence.

Then came 2008.

The IPL married this centuries-old Indian tradition with the American franchise model. What followed was the most explosive growth in sports franchise value the world has seen.

Sports teams are the new real estate

The IPL’s business value has surged to $18.5 billion, up 12.9% in a single year. Its brand value alone stands at $3.9 billion, up 13.8%. That places the IPL comfortably among the top five most valuable sports leagues in the world. 

What makes this more interesting than just a headline number is the structure underneath it. Top IPL franchises now clock ₹650–700 crore in annual revenues, with up to 80% visibility secured before the season even begins,  a combination of locked-in media rights, pre-committed sponsorships, and guaranteed central pool distributions. 

The franchise-level appreciation tells the same story. When RCB won their first maiden title their brand value surged to $269M, up 18.5% in one year. This established RCB as the no. 1 IPL brand in 2025. 

Cricket in India was never just a sport. It is the closest thing this country has to a shared religion, a ritual that cuts across language, class, and geography in a way that almost nothing else does. The IPL understood this from day one and built a product designed to intensify that obsession: shorter format, city identities, local heroes, prime-time scheduling. Seventeen years later, the numbers reflect what that bet produced.

In 2025, the league drew 1,370 million views on JioHotstar, up 35% year-on-year, alongside 253 million unique television viewers on Star Sports. To put that in context: the IPL’s opening weekend now draws more eyeballs than the Super Bowl draws in its entirety.

India’s billionaires are building sports empires

Most people know Mukesh Ambani owns Mumbai Indians. Here’s what they don’t know: he owns six cricket teams across five countries, controls India’s football league infrastructure, holds a 49% stake in a franchise in England’s The Hundred, and was reportedly in the running to buy Liverpool FC.

Mumbai Indians (IPL), MI Women (WPL), MI Cape Town (SA20), MI Emirates (ILT20), MI New York (MLC), the Oval Invincibles (The Hundred) — plus Reliance’s Football Sports Development Limited which commercially runs the Indian Super League. 

This isn’t just team ownership but a global sports conglomerate. The Mumbai Indians franchise alone carries a brand valuation of $242 million, second only to RCB in the IPL ecosystem.

Shah Rukh Khan’s Knight Riders group has taken a different but equally sophisticated approach. KKR in the IPL, Trinbago Knight Riders in the Caribbean, LA Knight Riders in Major League Cricket, Abu Dhabi Knight Riders in the ILT20, same brand identity, four continents. This is franchise-as-a-platform thinking, where the brand travels across leagues.

The quieter expansionists are just as strategic. Sanjeev Goenka’s RPSG Group owns Lucknow Super Giants, Manchester Originals in The Hundred, and Mohun Bagan Super Giant in the ISL. Kalanithi Maran’s Sun Group bought Sunrisers Hyderabad, then Sunrisers Eastern Cape in the SA20, and recently acquired a 100% stake in Northern Superchargers in The Hundred. The JSW Group, led by the Jindals, holds Delhi Capitals, Bengaluru FC, and sponsors a roster of Olympic athletes.

And the crossover into international football has already begun. VH Group from Pune became the first Indian owner of an English Premier League club when they acquired Blackburn Rovers in 2010. Lakshmi Mittal holds a stake in Queens Park Rangers.

What struck me, looking at this landscape, is the sophistication. These aren’t impulsive trophy purchases. Indian billionaires are applying the same diversification logic to sports that they apply to their business empires, spreading across geographies, sports, and leagues. They’re buying into emerging leagues early, riding the valuation wave as media deals mature. It’s portfolio construction, not fandom.

Follow the money: How sports franchises actually make money

A sports franchise generates revenue the way a premium hotel does — from many doors at once. And just like a hotel, the most valuable revenue streams are often invisible to the spectator.

Media rights are the foundation. The IPL’s domestic media revenues for 2026 are projected to cross $1.2 billion. In 2025, IPL advertising revenues hit $600 million — a 50% jump year-on-year. The Tata Group extended its title sponsorship through 2028 in a $300 million, five-year deal. These are locked-in, multi-year contracts — annuities that underpin every franchise valuation.

Sponsorships and advertising are the amplifier. BCCI’s sale of just four IPL associate-sponsor slots in 2025 generated ₹14,850 crore — a 25% increase from the previous cycle. Every jersey, boundary board, strategic timeout, and digital overlay is monetised. Mumbai Indians alone signed a ₹120 crore kit deal with Lauritz Knudsen, a three-year commitment from a European industrial brand.

Matchday revenue and hospitality are the lifestyle layer. Premium boxes, VIP experiences, exclusive fan zones — this is where sports intersects with the world our readers know well.

Merchandising and licensing extend the brand. Apparel, co-branded products, digital collectibles — the team becomes a consumer brand. Top IPL franchises are already testing this with creator collaborations, regional-language fan content, and early moves toward gamified loyalty programs.

Player development and trading is the hidden upside. The November 2024 IPL mega-auction saw ~$76 million spent on 182 players. Rishabh Pant went for ₹27 crore. Shreyas Iyer for ₹26.75 crore. These aren’t expenses — they’re assets on a franchise’s balance sheet.

Stack these streams together and a sports franchise starts looking less like an entertainment expense and more like a diversified operating business. The league contributes over ₹11,500 crore to India’s GDP annually. The league’s ecosystem generated $9.5 billion in total revenue in 2024. These aren’t vanity metrics. This is real economics.

The velvet rope is coming down

For decades, sports franchise ownership in India belonged to a very small club. Ambanis, Jindals, Goenkas. You needed ₹7,000 crore to get a seat at the IPL table. But something interesting is happening. The entry barriers are falling.

India now has professional franchise leagues in cricket (IPL, WPL, ISPL), football (ISL), kabaddi (Pro Kabaddi League), badminton (PBL), and most recently, pickleball. 

The numbers are striking: the non-cricket sports economy now contributes 14% of India’s total sports spending, roughly ₹2,559 crore, and is growing at 24% annually. For context, cricket’s growth in the same period was 14%. The challenger sports are moving faster than the incumbent. Every new league creates a new tier of entry for aspiring sports owners.

The Pro Kabaddi League now draws 350 million viewers per season — 310 million on TV, 40 million on OTT — with franchise valuations ranging from ₹150–250 crore. The Indian Super League attracts 232 million viewers, with ISL franchises seeing 20–30% annual sponsor growth. The Women’s Premier League, launched just two years ago, already draws 130 million viewers and registered 42% year-on-year viewership growth in 2024.

These three leagues together — PKL, ISL, WPL — represent a combined audience of over 700 million viewer interactions a season. No media property in India outside the IPL and news television comes close.

Consider the Indian Street Premier League. 

The ISPL is India’s first tennis ball T10 cricket tournament, born out of a talent hunt in the Dharavi slums. Six teams, each with a celebrity owner. One of those teams — Majhi Mumbai, the 2025 champions — is co-owned by Amitabh Bachchan and Neeti and Nipun Agrawal, directors of PATH India Limited, a construction company headquartered in Indore. 

The total investment flowing into ISPL has crossed ₹1,165 crore. But the individual team economics are a different universe from the IPL — Majhi Mumbai spent ₹84.30 lakh at its debut player auction. This is the story within the story. A family from Indore, running an infrastructure business, co-owning a championship-winning sports team
(Majhi Mumbai) with one of India’s biggest film stars. Five years ago, they would not have been part of this conversation. The league is now planning a Middle East edition.

And then there’s pickleball, currently the fastest-growing urban sport in India, with over 100,000 regular players across 17 states, with projections targeting one million by 2028. India now has not one but two franchise-based pickleball leagues (The World Pickleball League and The Indian Pickleball League). The sport is popular with people of all ages, and support from companies and local communities has helped more people notice it.

The entry price for pickleball is a fraction of cricket. But the playbook is identical: franchise-based, city-identified, media-backed, celebrity-anchored. The IPL template is being replicated across a widening set of sports. India’s sports sector is projected to reach $130 billion by 2030 at a 14% CAGR, with core and allied sub-sectors — from nutraceuticals to sports technology — expected to contribute equally to the sporting economy. 

What the IPL did for cricket in 2008, newer leagues are doing for a broader set of sports and a broader set of owners. The funnel is widening, fast.

In summary

When Edoardo Agnelli bought Juventus in 1923, it wasn’t about owning a football club. It became something that defined the family for generations. A hundred years later, the Maharaja of Patiala’s legacy lives on in the Ranji Trophy, and the Tatas’ sporting investments are woven into the fabric of Indian athletic history.

Sports ownership was never about the trophy in the cabinet. It was always about legacy, influence, and  increasingly, extraordinary wealth creation.

Three things to take away:

1. Sports franchises are a legitimate asset class. With 14%+ annual compounding over two decades globally, they’ve outperformed public equities. The combination of scarcity, guaranteed media revenues, and institutional capital is creating a valuation flywheel.

2. Indian billionaires are building global sports portfolios. Ambani’s six-team, five-country cricket empire. SRK’s four-continent Knight Riders brand. The Goenkas, Marans, and Jindals expanded across leagues and geographies. This is diversification with strategic intent.

3. The ownership circle is expanding. New leagues, new sports, and dramatically lower entry points mean that sports franchise ownership is no longer the exclusive preserve of the top 100 richest Indians. From pickleball franchises to tennis ball cricket tournaments, a new generation of wealth creators is entering the game.

The Maharaja of Patiala would have recognised the impulse. Economics would have delighted him.

Disclaimer – The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only.

Through this narrow passage flows one-fifth of all the oil the world consumes every day. And when tanker traffic through it grounded to a near halt in March 2026, the effects landed not in some distant commodity market but in the LPG cylinder sitting behind your stove.

Here is the number most people do not know: India’s strategic reserve for crude oil covers roughly 74 days. For LPG,  the fuel that heats 330 million Indian households, that buffer is estimated at just 10 to 30 days.

This edition is not about geopolitics. So this week, instead of adding to the noise, I want to do something more useful. I want to map, as clearly as I can, exactly what this crisis means for India, and what it does not. Because the story, it turns out, is considerably more nuanced than the headlines suggest.

In this edition:

• The Strait of Hormuz :  what it is and why it matters? 
• How exposed India really is?
• First-order shocks: the rupee, the deficit, interest rates and inflation
• Second-order shocks: food prices, remittances, and the export damage
• The sector scorecard:  who hurts, who gains
• What does history actually say?
• India’s buffers – why this is serious, but not fatal
• What should you actually do right now?

Let’s begin!

What really happened?

Let me start with the geography, because it explains everything that follows. Picture a very narrow stretch of water between Iran and Oman called the Strait of Hormuz. At its narrowest point, it’s only about 33 km wide. Yet through this tiny passage flows about 20 million barrels of oil every day, roughly one-fifth of everything the world consumes. 

That makes it one of the most important energy routes on the planet.

On 2 March 2026, following the US-Israel strike on Iran, tanker traffic through the Strait ground to a near halt. Formally, no one closed it. Iran said it had not blocked the waterway. And yet, shipping effectively stopped, not because of a blockade, but because of insurance. Oil tankers need war-risk insurance to sail through dangerous areas.

When tensions rose, many insurance companies stopped covering ships in the Gulf. And without insurance: ships cannot enter ports, cargo owners cannot protect their goods and banks refuse to finance the shipments. And reopening it can take time, because insurers will only return once they believe the region is truly safe again, not just because politicians say the conflict is over.

Can oil avoid this route?

A little bit can.

• Saudi Aramco has a pipeline that sends oil across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea.
• The United Arab Emirates also has a pipeline that sends oil to the port of Fujairah.

Together, these alternatives can move around 6–7 million barrels per day. But that’s only about one-third of what normally passes through Hormuz. The remaining two-thirds has no quick alternative route.

What began as a US-Israeli military operation against Iran on 28 February has cascaded into the most significant energy disruption in over a decade. Brent crude has soared past its baseline, currently sitting 70% above the $68 average recorded in 2025.

How exposed India really is?

Since the conflict began on 28 February, Indian markets have shed roughly ₹25 lakh crore in market capitalisation. The Nifty 50 has fallen about 10% from its January peak, entering correction territory. FIIs sold nearly ₹21,000 crore in the first week alone, and the selling has been broad — aviation, paints, auto, PSU banks, and metals have led declines. 

Behind this market reaction lies a deeper vulnerability. 

India imported 67% of its LPG requirement in 2024, up from 47% a decade ago. More than 95% of those imports come from the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar,  all sitting behind the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. 

The wider energy dependency tells the same story at every level. 

India imports 85–88% of its crude oil. Roughly 40% of those imports transit Hormuz directly. The strait is also the exit route for about 90% of India’s LPG imports and 53% of its LNG, sourced primarily from Qatar and the UAE.  

But for crude oil, India has a buffer. Strategic reserves in Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru, and Padur cover about 74 days of consumption. For LPG, there is no equivalent strategic reserve. We have roughly 10 to 30 days of supply. If disruption lasts beyond that window, the risk moves from markets to household kitchens.

India has begun diversifying its energy sources. Higher crude purchases from Russia have reduced some dependence on the Middle East. In November 2025, state-run oil companies also signed a one-year deal to import LPG from the US, covering about 10% of annual demand, while Australia is in discussions to supply more. These are the right structural moves — but diversification takes time and does little to solve a 30-day supply shock.

The dependency is structural, broad, and deep. Which brings us to the obvious question: how bad does it get, and for how long?

First order shocks : The macro hit

Widening Current Account Deficit (imports >exports)

India imports about 80% of its oil, so when global oil prices rise, the country has to pay much more in dollars. Roughly, every $10 increase in oil prices costs India about 0.3% of its GDP. At current levels, that means $7–8 billion more leaving the country every month, or nearly $90 billion extra a year just to pay for oil imports.

Because oil is paid for in US dollars, India has to sell rupees to buy those dollars. When a lot of rupees are sold in the market, the currency weakens. That’s why the Indian Rupee has been falling against the US Dollar.

Inflation

A 10% rise in global oil prices usually increases India’s inflation by about 0.5–0.7 percentage points. Since oil has jumped from around $69 to nearly 50% higher, the full pass-through could add roughly 2.5–3.5 percentage points to inflation.

But India doesn’t pass this on immediately. State-run oil companies — HPCL, BPCL and IOC, often absorb part of the increase so petrol and diesel prices don’t rise as quickly. This shifts the pressure away from consumers and onto the government’s finances and the oil companies’ margin. 

Interest Rates

Everyone thought the RBI would cut interest rates (easing) down to 5.00% to make loans cheaper and boost the economy. Because oil is high and the Rupee is weak, the RBI cannot afford to cut rates. If they cut rates now, the Rupee might fall even faster. Rate cuts are off the table.

The Rupee: Record Lows

The rupee touched ₹92.29 per dollar earlier this cycle. A weaker Rupee makes everything we import (especially that expensive oil) even more costly. The RBI (Reserve Bank of India) is currently intervening, basically spending its savings (foreign forex reserves) to stop the Rupee from crashing even further.

When oil goes up, the Rupee goes down. When the Rupee goes down, inflation goes up. To stop inflation and save the Rupee, the RBI has to keep interest rates high. All of that is the macro layer. Now let us move to where you actually feel it.

Second order shocks : What you feel at home

Macro variables like the current account, the rupee, or interest rates matter. But the real impact shows up closer to home — your gas cylinder, grocery bill, or a family member working in the Gulf.

LPG Crunch

On 5 March 2026, the government invoked the Essential Commodities Act, directing refineries to prioritise household LPG over commercial users. Restaurants in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru are already facing shortages. India’s LPG buffer is only 10–30 days, compared with 74 days for crude, so supply pressure could emerge quickly.

Fertiliser to Food

India imports about 40% of its fertilisers from West Asia. With supply disruptions and higher diesel costs, food inflation could rise 150–200 bps next quarter — a delayed effect that typically appears 6–8 weeks later.

Remittance Risk

The human dimension that macro commentary always misses: 9 million Indians live in the Gulf. And the money they send home helps support India’s finances and reduce the current account deficit. Gulf countries account for about 38% of India’s remittances ($51.4B of $135.4B in FY2025).

Export Damage

West Asia is not just where India’s oil comes from. It is also a major market for what India sells. GCC countries account for 13% of India’s exports and 16% of imports, with the UAE alone at 8.75% of exports. Both channels are disrupted simultaneously.

This is the full picture: a macro shock layered over a supply shock and a trade shock, all hitting at once. Knowing where the damage lands tells you which parts of your portfolio are exposed, and which ones offer cover. 

The sector scorecard : Who hurts, who gains

Not every part of your portfolio is equally exposed. Some sectors are directly in the line of fire. Others are natural beneficiaries of exactly the conditions this conflict has created.

Who hurts

Airlines are the most direct casualty. Aviation turbine fuel represents 30–40% of operating costs. Airspaces have been closed, flights cancelled, and emergency hedging notices filed. If rates stay elevated, the sector faces a double hit: higher fuel costs and rising interest rates on already leveraged balance sheets.

PSU Oil Marketing Companies (HPCL, BPCL, IOC) are caught between rising crude procurement costs and politically constrained pump prices. Gross refining margins are collapsing. 

Paint companies 

If you look at a bucket of paint, about one-third of what’s inside (and the cost to make it) comes directly from petroleum. So when oil rises sharply, input costs jump. Companies such as Asian Paints and Berger Paints India Limited can’t raise prices immediately, which means profits per bucket shrink — a classic margin squeeze. 

Real Estate
Real estate isn’t directly linked to oil, but it’s sensitive to interest rates. If higher oil pushes inflation and rate hikes, mortgage costs rise and housing demand can slow.

Who gains?

EVs and Renewables:  At $100 oil, the green transition becomes an economic necessity. In 2025, India added 44.5 GW of renewable capacity, nearly double the 24.7 GW added the previous year. Solar crossed 100 GW in January. High fuel costs are also pushing fleet operators toward EVs faster to protect margins.

Defence manufacturing: HAL, BEL, Mazagon Dock, can benefit structurally. Even if this specific conflict resolves quickly, a more fragmented world order will underpin higher defence spending for the foreseeable future.

IT Services: Revenues are in dollars, costs largely in rupees. With the rupee around ₹91–92, each dollar converts into higher rupee earnings, while global uncertainty often accelerates digital spending.

Upstream Oil
Producers like ONGC and OIL benefit directly from higher oil prices. When crude recently jumped 12%, both stocks rallied 5–7%, while refiners like BPCL and HPCL face margin pressure.

Now, before you act on any of this, there is a body of evidence worth sitting with carefully — because it tells a story that most investors, in the grip of a crisis, actively resist believing.

What history actually says 

The instinct when oil spikes is to act. History, quite consistently, says the right instinct is to stay. The 2003 Iraq War is the closest historical parallel — a US-led military confrontation with a Middle Eastern state, Brent crude peaked at $40 per barrel in early 2003 (30% premium), and Sensex declined approximately 15% in the weeks following the invasion. 

What happened next is what your instincts will fight against believing. Within 12 months of that trough, the Sensex delivered 83% returns.  The investors who sold during panic missed one of the great bull runs of the decade. We mapped five recognisable phases of war, and the lesson from each is sharp.So, the pattern is simple: conflict creates fear, fear creates discount, discount creates opportunity. The same pattern holds across every major geopolitical shock in Indian market history.

Every major geopolitical crisis in living memory has eventually resolved, and Indian equities have rewarded patient investors. The first month after a major oil spike is often negative. If you can hold through 90 days of volatility, the 6-month and 12-month windows are overwhelmingly positive. 

The investors who get hurt are not the ones who stayed, they are the ones who sold during the gut-punch month and watched the recovery from the sidelines.

India’s current position

Every time India faces an external shock, the comparison to 2012–2013 surfaces. Back then, the rupee crashed to ₹68, the current account deficit hit 4.8% of GDP, and the phrase Fragile Five entered the lexicon. That experience left a lasting psychological scar.

But the balance sheet looks meaningfully different today.

The Russia crude pivot is crucial here. After 2022, India increased Russian crude imports from under 2% to over 40% in just 18 months. That shift doesn’t remove the Hormuz risk, but it softens the impact in moderate scenarios by providing a structural cost hedge.

Here is the thing about this shock: India in 2026 is not India in 2008 or even 2013. The buffers are real, and they are historically strong.

What you should actually do (about your money)

Let me bring everything together into the practical question: what do you do with your portfolio right now?

1. Watch Oil, Not Headlines

Brent at $90–95 is still manageable for India’s macro stability. Sustained prices above $100 strain earnings, and above $120 for more than a month would likely force downgrades. The oil price is your dashboard — not the news.

2. Do Not Exit. Rebalance.

Exiting equities to re-enter at a lower level sounds rational. In practice, it almost never works — you have to be right twice (when to exit, when to return). Your asset allocation was built to survive moments exactly like this. Honor it.

3. Use Dips as Accumulation Windows

If markets correct 8–15% driven by fear rather than a permanent impairment of India’s economic capacity, that is historically a gift. The 2003 and 2008 data are unambiguous on this.

4. Step Up Your SIPs

SIPs are most powerful in exactly this environment. When NAVs fall, each instalment buys more units. When the recovery comes — and historically it has, within 12–18 months — the compounding on a lower average cost is disproportionately powerful.

In conclusion

You can’t predict how this conflict unfolds, no one can do that reliably, but you can 

ensure that your portfolio is positioned to endure volatility and capture opportunity on the other side. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. But for the patient, long-term investor, it has historically been part of the compounding process.

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, or providing any financial or investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments. Any statements about future developments are speculative and should not be taken as guarantees. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or recommendation.

She figured it out. She’s now one of the most financially engaged people I work with. But it cost her months, money, and peace of mind she’ll never get back. This newsletter is about making sure no woman has to learn this way. 

And on the occasion of International Women’s Day, I want to make the case, with complete conviction, that financial control is not a privilege Indian women should aspire to. It is a necessity they can no longer afford to defer.

In this edition

• The confidence-action gap: Why intent isn’t translating into ownership
• How do women fare across three Important aspects of finance?
• Why the gap persists: The system that wasn’t designed for her
• The longevity reality: The financial timeline no one talks about
• What’s changing: The shift is already happening
• The non-negotiable checklist: Five things every household must get right
• A note for men: The single most impactful thing you can do

The confidence – action gap

Here’s what’s puzzling. If you survey Indian women today, 84% say they’re confident enough to make their own investment decisions, a number that has climbed significantly in just three years. Women are more financially aware, more digitally active, and more vocal about wanting control of their money than at any point in our history.

And yet: 45% still take a backseat on investment decisions. 57% feel they’re not making the best choices. 42% say someone else in the household is simply better at it.

The confidence is there. The action isn’t. That gap between knowing and doing is where the real problem lives. And it’s worth asking: if intent is no longer the barrier, what is?

To answer that, it helps to first understand where women actually stand, not in terms of confidence or intent, but in terms of real financial behaviour and outcomes. 

How do women fare across three Important aspects of finance?

1) Investing : Research from Fidelity, one of the world’s largest fund houses, consistently shows that women outperform men as long-term investors, and the reasons are structural to how women invest: they trade less, they hold longer, and they are less prone to the overconfidence bias that causes men to churn their portfolios at exactly the wrong moment. This long-term orientation is closely tied to the growing adoption of SIPs. SIPs, by design, automate discipline, they reduce the temptation to time the market and turn investing into a monthly habit rather than a series of emotional decisions. And women are embracing this structure at scale.

Women’s SIP AUM surged by 319% in five years, from ₹0.77 lakh crore in March 2019 to ₹3.24 lakh crore by March 2024. Today, women account for over 30.5% of India’s total SIP AUM. 

And while both men and women are holding investments longer, women are slightly more committed to the long game. The share of new money (held less than one year) dropped significantly for women, from 40.5% to 25.4%, indicating they are staying invested rather than entering and exiting frequently.

When women decide to invest, they commit more. This is not what the conventional narrative about cautious, risk-averse women investors would predict. The evidence points to an investor who thinks carefully before acting, and then acts decisively.

2. Borrowing: The same discipline shows up in credit behaviour. In India, 66% of women borrowers have a credit score of prime or above (737-900), compared to 60% of men. Their delinquency rate is 1.6%, versus 2.2% for men. More reliable borrowers, more committed investors, the capability signal is consistent across every dimension of financial behaviour.

3) How women spend and save: Women are better savers and more disciplined spenders, driven by higher risk aversion and a focus on long-term goals. They favour steady growth over high-risk bets, only 8% are willing to maximise returns if it involves higher risk, and most are unwilling to risk their principal capital for a chance at higher gains. Nearly half prefer low-risk options with moderate growth: they want to see their money grow, but not at the expense of their peace of mind.

Now hold that capability alongside this reality: Men hold a massive 75.8% share of the investor pool, while women account for only 24.2%. Even among high-net-worth women, those with ₹10 crore or more in net worth, less than half are strongly involved in their family’s investment decisions.

And yet, the desire is clearly not the problem. In surveys of HNI women conducted by an investment advisory firm, 95% express strong interest in investing across diverse asset classes. It’s the activation that is missing. This gap between capability and control is not a talent gap. It is a participation gap. 

And understanding where it comes from is the first step to closing it.

Why the gap persists: The system that wasn’t designed for her

It’s not one thing. The barriers are layered, and they interact in ways that are easy to miss when you’re looking for a single cause.

The household default. 65% of women who don’t decide alone say their spouse is the primary decision-maker. For many households, this isn’t oppression, it’s how things are. He was interested, she wasn’t, and over time the division of labour calcified. But convenience becomes vulnerability the moment circumstances change. And circumstances always change.

The generational handoff. Financial behaviour is learned behaviour, and it is passed down. Even well-intentioned parents unconsciously steer daughters toward savings accounts and sons toward investment accounts. The gap often begins before a woman has ever held a job.

The growing opt-out. Here’s the number no one is talking about: the percentage of women who have never attempted to learn about investing actually increased, from 10% to 14%. While the headline story is empowerment, there is a minority moving in the opposite direction. No one is talking about them.

Information is not neutral. 97% of women cite a ‘lack of information’ as a primary reason for hesitancy in trying new financial products and not a lack of interest. Interest is not the problem. The problem is that financial products and their communication have historically been built around male archetypes: men as earners, investors, and protectors. Women are more visible in ads today, but are rarely shown as primary financial decision-makers. Family-focused messaging dominates over women’s personal financial goals, with little product tailoring for their unique needs.

The longevity reality

Indian women outlive men by 3 to 5 years on average. In most households, there will come a point, not might, will, where she is the sole financial decision-maker.

My client’s wife was 47 when that moment arrived. She could have 30 to 40 more years of financial life ahead of her. That is not a footnote. That is potentially the longest relationship she will ever have with money,  longer than her career, longer than her marriage.

9% of women who became sole decision-makers were forced into it by unforeseen events, death, divorce, a spouse’s illness. That number is rising. And the cost of being unprepared is not just emotional. When you don’t understand your portfolio, you liquidate the wrong asset. You pay avoidable taxes. You trust the first person who offers help because you don’t have a framework to evaluate their advice. The financial cost of not knowing compounds, just like the investments themselves.

And for a male CXO or founder reading this: the wealth you are building right now has a significant probability of being managed, eventually, solely by your spouse. If she has never been in the room when investment decisions are made, you have left her structurally exposed at the most vulnerable point in her life.

Familiarity with a portfolio cannot be built overnight during grief. Financial confidence is not a switch. It is built through years of involvement, and the window to build it is now, not later.

But things are changing

Today, one in every four unique individual investors in Indian mutual funds is a woman. Women making independent investment decisions jumped from 44% to 56% in three years. Their mutual fund AUM more than doubled in five years, from ₹4.59 lakh crore to ₹11.25 lakh crore. The pace of change in women’s financial participation over the last decade is one of the most underreported economic stories in India.

And it’s happening across multiple fronts simultaneously.

1. The leap to financial Inclusion

Financial independence begins with access, and women are no longer on the sidelines of the formal banking system. The percentage of women owning and using a bank account jumped from 53% to 79%, and of all bank accounts opened under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, a majority, 29.56 crore accounts, belong to women. Female literacy is also rising faster than male literacy, reaching 74.6% in 2024, which directly correlates with better financial decision-making.

2. From gold to stocks: Breaking the traditional mould

The traditional portfolio of gold jewellery and property is being traded in for a digital dashboard of stocks and professional funds. Listed equity has overtaken gold as the top asset class for HNI women, 61.9% now prefer listed equities over gold or real estate as their primary asset class. This shift signals growing financial confidence and market literacy. 

4. Tech-Savviness as an Empowering Tool

Between 2014 and 2021, the percentage of women making digital payments doubled from 14% to 28%, outstripping the growth rate of men. Mobile internet adoption among women rose to 37% in 2023, providing fertile ground for app-based investing. The digital divide is closing fast, making it easier for women to take control of their portfolios from their smartphones.

5. The geographical footprint of financial inclusion

Importantly, this shift is not a metropolitan story. Women investors in tier-4 cities grew by over 140% in 2024 alone. Young women under 35 in smaller cities account for a significantly larger share of AUM than their counterparts in major metros. 

And here is the data point that tells you this is also cultural: in matrilineal states like Mizoram and Nagaland, women’s investment participation is the highest in the country, 44% and 39% respectively. Where culture gives women financial agency, they take it.

What’s driving the shift everywhere else? Women increasingly associate money with freedom, that number jumped from 28% to 35% in three years. Among younger unmarried women, 78% prioritize financial independence over marriage stability.

Again the desire is there. The infrastructure at home needs to catch up.

The household conversation: A non-negotiable checklist

Start this weekend. These are five questions every household should be able to answer and both partners should know the answers, not just one.

• Where is all the money? Every account, every instrument, every login, every nominee.
• Are you listed as a nominee on your partner’s accounts, bank, demat, insurance, PF? Is your partner listed on yours? When did you last check?
• What debt exists? Who’s servicing it? What happens to it if circumstances change?
• What insurance exists, and what does it actually cover?
• Is there a will? Is it updated?
• Are investment decisions reflecting her goals too, or just the household’s?
• Do you have even one demat account in your own name: a SIP, or a mutual fund folio.

The goal isn’t to upend who does what overnight. It’s to make sure no one is ever blindsided. She should be able to walk into any room, with any advisor, any banker, any lawyer, and know exactly what she owns, what she owes, and what she wants.

A note for men

Here’s something the data made very clear: the single fastest-growing reason women start making independent investment decisions isn’t a course, an app, or a government initiative. It’s their partner encouraging them. That number jumped from 14% to 18% in just three years.

So if you’re the man in the household who handles the money, your role isn’t to keep handling it better. It’s to stop being the single point of failure. That’s not strength. It’s a risk you’re creating for your family.

Start by sharing. Women are already more financially transparent than you might think, 65% share their salary details with their partner, versus 58% of men. The openness is already there. Match it.

And this goes beyond your spouse. The data shows that even progressive mothers are unconsciously steering daughters toward savings over investments. Financial literacy is inherited behaviour, the version you model and pass on, to your wife, your daughter, your mother, your sister, matters more than any financial product they’ll ever be offered.

The research is clear on what actually changes a woman’s financial engagement. It is not a compelling ad, not a financial influencer, and not a government scheme.

It is family validation. The most powerful trigger for a woman’s financial engagement is the support and active involvement of the people closest to her. 

Here is what that looks like in practice;

• Giving access before giving advice, sharing the portfolio, the login, telling her where things are.
• Framing an investment around something she actually cares about.
• Having a simple conversation: ask her what she wants the money to do, and let her lead that part.

Financial independence is not just about the numbers in a bank account. It is the freedom to make decisions, to bear the weight of uncertainty, and to live life on your own terms. Women already have the capability, the discipline, and the intent. Now it is time to claim ownership.
This Women’s Day, don’t just celebrate how far you’ve come. Make sure you have a hand on the wheel for where you’re going.

Disclaimer – The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or recommendation.

When I first read this Deloitte data,  my first instinct was to file it with the other confident predictions that never quite arrive on schedule.

But then I kept reading. Human advisors drop from 35% to 31%. Financial websites  currently used by 28% of investors fall to just 9%.

It wasn’t the headline that got me. It was the granularity. Someone had done the math on which advisors disappear first, which channels go obsolete, and by when.

That report was still sitting with me when I walked into a conversation with Pratik Bagaria — one of our fund managers at Dezerv and realised he’d been chasing the same question from a different angle entirely.

His starting point wasn’t a Deloitte report. It was a viral video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. AI-generated, laughably bad, noodles flying sideways, jaw moving at impossible angles. He laughed and moved on.

Eight months later, he watched another AI video. Same kind of task. He couldn’t tell.

That gap,  from comically bad to indistinguishable, in under a year,  planted a question he couldn’t shake: if AI moved that fast in creative work, what was happening in analytical work? Specifically, in the domain he spent every day in: portfolio management.

So on August 4th, 2025, Pratik ran an experiment. Five AI models — Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude and one brief: build a 10-stock portfolio to beat the Nifty 500.  Six months in, we have results. And they’re more interesting than either of us expected.

In this edition:

• The experiment: What we asked 5 AI models to do  and why
• Month 6 results: Which AI is winning, and is it luck or skill?
• The real story: Each model’s personality revealed in its stock picks
• The prompt problem: Why changing one word breaks everything
• Institutional reality: What AMCs are actually doing with AI today
• The PM as pilot: What AI can and cannot do
• Will AI Replace Wealth Managers? The 80/20 Rule
• The 2026 AI arbitrage

Let’s get into it.

The experiment: Five models, one brief

The prompt was deliberately clean. No hints, no sector tilts, no views on macro. Just a simple mandate:

“Create a portfolio of stocks with the following guidelines.

Guidelines:

1. Investment Objective is to outperform Nifty 500 TRI.
2. Investment Horizon is 12 Months. 
3. Invest in exactly 10 stocks, the stocks must be listed on NSE or BSE.
4. Assume that I will not undertake any rebalancing of this portfolio.

Provide me the name of the stocks and their respective weights. Also, give me a 200 word rationale for your portfolio”

AI Model Portfolio Comparison

The Results: Who’s winning?

Halfway through the 12-month experiment, Gemini and Perplexity are outperforming the Nifty 500 TRI, Grok and ChatGPT are underperforming, and Claude sits essentially at market performance.

Here’s the assessment:

But what emerged wasn’t just five stock lists, it was five different personalities making five different bets. Even though these models are trained on overlapping internet data, the portfolios felt built by entirely different fund managers. That’s the result of thousands of design decisions baked into each model that most users never see.

Five Portfolios, Five Personalities

To understand the model’s rationale behind picking certain stocks, let’s analyse whether there is a correlation between a model’s general personality and its investment style. 

And here’s where this experiment gets genuinely fascinating: the stock picks were direct expressions of each model’s engineering philosophy.

1. Perplexity:  Perplexity’s architecture is built around Retrieval-Augmented Generation, it is built for recency. It pulls live data before answering, and the portfolio reflects exactly that — Suzlon’s fresh order book, Solar Industries riding current government incentives, Polycab and Cummins tied to active spending cycles.  This is a portfolio of what the market was talking about right now, not what has always worked. It is reactive by design  which is either its edge or its risk.
   
2. Gemini: It thinks in frameworks. Every pick, ICICI Bank, Reliance, L&T, Bajaj Finance, is an unambiguous market leader. No mid-caps, no small-cap bets, equal weights across the board. It’s not making strong relative calls; it’s saying these are quality companies, own them. Apollo Hospitals and Siemens sneak in as systematic, theme-based thinking,  long-cycle structural trends backed by data. Safe, institutional, and very deliberate.
   
3. Claude: It hedges, acknowledges uncertainty, cross-references rather than asserts. It’s the only model that cited an external source — Motilal Oswal’s top picks, to validate its selections. Rather than backing its own conviction fully, it borrowed credibility from a known authority. The portfolio follows suit: Sun Pharma and Tata Consumer for stability, Bharti Airtel as a compounder rather than a growth bet, and Macrotech at just 7%,  included, but barely, as if it wasn’t fully sold on the idea.
   
4. ChatGPT: ChatGPT is designed to be broadly helpful and palatable to the widest possible audience — the answer a smart generalist would give. Thorough, defensible, not particularly edgy. The portfolio is the most balanced of the five: it covers banking, pharma, infrastructure, consumer, and even a small-cap optionality bet. No strong sectoral view — just broad, defensible coverage. Each stock comes with its own specific narrative rather than one overarching thesis.
   
5. Grok bets big. It is built with an explicit anti-establishment personality, designed to challenge consensus, push boundaries, and take risks where other models hedge. It’s the only model that puts Adani Enterprises as its top holding — a stock most advisors handle carefully.  It also loaded up on Suzlon and Jio Financial, both high-conviction, high-beta bets. Zero defensive allocation. The portfolio reads like someone who spotted upside others were too timid to take. 

What’s striking is that no model broke character,  Grok was bold, ChatGPT balanced, Gemini systematic, Perplexity current, Claude hedged. These models weren’t doing independent financial analysis; they were applying their conversational personality to a financial problem. 

The two outperformers, Gemini and Perplexity, won by avoiding narrative-driven picks and anchoring to structural data instead — models that chased stories ended up buying at the top. 

All of this becomes more consequential as these systems move closer to real financial workflows. Recent developments show that shift clearly. Perplexity Finance now connects directly to FactSet and SEC filings to generate fast, cited summaries, useful for independent advisors needing rapid intelligence at low cost.

Claude, meanwhile, has introduced plugins for financial analysis, equity research, and wealth management. Through its Model Context Protocol, it connects to internal data platforms like Snowflake, bridging proprietary firm data with live market feeds.


But the infrastructure upgrade doesn’t close the governance gap. Firms still need audit trails, compliance filters, and usage frameworks. And hallucination risk doesn’t disappear with specialisation, it simply becomes more polished, and therefore harder to detect.

Character vs. Consistency: The AI Performance Gap

Before we get carried away by the six-month numbers, let me ask the uncomfortable question: are the results good because the models are robust or is this just a coin flip that landed well?

My honest answer: the data is inconclusive, and likely leaning toward mixed. Two models outperforming, two underperforming, that’s probably simple variance. Over a six-month window in a specific market regime, any diversified portfolio has roughly a coin-flip chance of beating the index.

To prove this isn’t a one-off, the models would need a consistent Sharpe Ratio that holds across different market cycles. A bull run favours almost everyone. The real test is what happens when sentiment turns, liquidity dries up, and volatility spikes. We haven’t seen that test yet.

These models are not deterministic, ask the same question tomorrow and you won’t get the same portfolio. There’s no accountability loop, no conviction maintained across time. If the model recommended Reliance at 10% last August and it’s down 15%, it might take a completely different position today without ever reconciling the contradiction.

For now that makes them stochastic brainstormers, not disciplined Portfolio Managers.

The PM as Pilot: A precise map of what AI can and cannot do

By 2026, the Pilot vs. Autopilot dynamic has become standard across every high-stakes profession. AI is the world’s best radiologist,  yet it cannot replace a doctor’s empathy when delivering a difficult diagnosis. Algorithms can audit 10,000 documents in seconds, but cannot argue a case where human intuition wins the day.

The modern Portfolio Manager has made the same shift: from calculator to pilot. What defines their value today is everything the autopilot can’t do.

What AI can do:

1. Extract Signal from Alternative Data at Scale. Satellite imagery of shipping ports, real-time credit card flows, social media sentiment, AI turns this noise into actionable leading indicators continuously, not just quarterly.
2. Contextual Document Auditing. AI flags if Risk Factor wording subtly changed year-on-year, if a footnote contradicts the CEO’s letter, or if management’s vocabulary on earnings calls has shifted evasively over five years.
3. Multi-Dimensional Screening. Beyond static filters, AI uses cluster analysis to screen 10,000+ stocks by latent factors, supply chain exposure, patent trajectories, geopolitical risk correlation, in seconds.
4. Real-Time Risk Monitoring. AI detects hidden correlations that only emerge under stress and runs instant what-if simulations. The answer comes in seconds, not days.
5. Surgical Execution. AI minimises slippage, automates rebalancing, and can already predict roughly 71% of active fund trading decisions based on historical patterns.

What AI cannot do:

1. The Field Visit. AI cannot fly to a factory and notice demoralised workers or poorly maintained machinery. It cannot read a CFO’s body language in person. This primary data doesn’t exist in any database.
2. Form Relationships. The best insights come from trusted conversations, not public data. No AI can take a retired industry veteran out for coffee and extract the off-the-record insight that builds a truly differentiated thesis.
3. Second-Order Thinking. AI is excellent at first-order logic. It fails at the recursive logic of markets: if everyone believes this insight, how will the market overreact, and how do I profit from their collective mistake? That remains uniquely human. The same gap appears in macro shifts. AI records a trade restriction as a revenue variable. A human portfolio manager sees the chain reaction — nationalist politics, regulatory retaliation, supply chain rewiring, capital reallocation over a decade. AI sees the data point. The human sees what the data point sets in motion.
4. Strategic Courage. When a portfolio is down 20%, AI cannot have conviction, only an optimisation function. The leap of faith required to back a visionary against the data is not programmable. It is earned.
5. Accountability Gap: When an AI recommends a stock that drops 40%, nobody is responsible. No fines, no licence at risk, no fiduciary breach. A human portfolio manager carries real weight, they answer to investors, revisit their thesis, and have reputation and capital on the line. An AI has no skin in the game; it just generates a new recommendation the next day. 

Will AI Replace Wealth Managers? The 80/20 Rule

I think about wealth management as 20% math and 80% life design. AI is genuinely superior at math — portfolio construction, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting — and most of that will be automated within five years. But the 80% is a different problem entirely. 

Understanding why a client’s relationship with money was shaped by watching their father lose everything, helping someone hold equity through a 35% drawdown without selling, navigating the emotions of a business exit, none of that is a data problem. It’s a human one. 

For retail investors, AI is a powerful research tool that democratises analysis once reserved for institutional desks. But only if the investor has enough financial literacy to know what to do with the output.

The Risk Nobody Is Talking About

What happens when millions of people ask the same AI for a good stock at the same time? If every retail investor queries the same model and gets the same recommendations, the resulting demand creates the very price appreciation that validates the pick — which then gets surfaced to the next wave of users. The AI-driven reflexive loop could be faster and more concentrated than anything we’ve seen.

The second risk is more insidious: institutional bias encoded in the model. If a firm trains its AI on data tilted toward its own products, the model will “neutrally” recommend those products. The bias is invisible, which makes it more dangerous, not less.

The 2026 Model: Three tiers of wealth management

When everyone has the same tool, the differentiator is no longer access to data — it’s the quality of the question you bring to it. The investor who can challenge the AI’s thesis rather than accept it, who brings domain expertise to the interface, retains a meaningful edge. The AI arbitrage in 2026 is not about who has access. It’s about who uses it with the most precise intent and who retains the judgment to disagree with it when it’s wrong.

That edge will look different across different investor profiles. Here’s how I see the landscape settling.

For most readers of this newsletter — CXOs, founders, senior professionals managing meaningful wealth — you sit in the hybrid tier. That’s precisely where the human-AI balance matters most.  At Dezerv, we’ve always believed that the best investment process combines the rigour of data with the wisdom of judgment. AI gives us sharper tools. It doesn’t change what we’re building toward: wealth that compounds quietly, through cycles, over decades.

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. The AI model portfolios discussed are part of an internal experimental study and do not constitute an investment product, investment approach, recommendation, offer, solicitation or advisory service. The stocks, allocations and performance shown are for illustration only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Readers are advised to consult with their financial advisor before making investment decisions based on the information provided herein.

In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used information developed in-house and publicly available information believed to be reliable. The information is not a complete disclosure of every material fact and terms and conditions. While reasonable care has been made to present reliable data in this article, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data. The information / data herein alone is not sufficient and shouldn’t be used for the development or implementation of an investment strategy.

Dezerv, along with its directors, employees, or partners or any of its affiliates, shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or liability arising from the use of this document. Additionally, all trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification purposes only. The use of these names, trademarks, and logos does not imply endorsement or recommendation.

In FY26, over 50% of homes sold across India’s top 7 cities (excluding Mumbai) were priced at ₹1.5 crore or higher.

Think about that for a moment. For decades, “affordable housing” was the centrepiece of every urban policy debate in India. Subsidies, priority lending, government schemes — the entire system was built around the premise that India was a nation of budget buyers. That narrative is dead.

In FY16, the affordable and mid-end segments powered 74% of residential absorption. Fast forward a decade to FY26, luxury and ultra-luxury represent 53% of the market. The affordable segment’s share has been cut in half. Ultra-luxury demand has nearly tripled.

But here’s what’s most interesting to me: the real story isn’t that Indians aren’t buying homes. It’s that the profile of the Indian who is buying has changed entirely. And the second-order effects of that shift — on rents, on banking, on cities themselves — are still underappreciated.

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• The structural shift from a volume-led to a value-led market
• What’s really driving the luxury boom — GCCs, ESOPs, and a new class of wealth
• Why affordable housing is quietly disappearing from Tier-1 supply
• The rent paradox: rents up 24%, yields flat
• Why banks are writing bigger cheques to fewer people
• What all of this means for your portfolio in 2026

Let’s begin!

The volume – value reversal: a market splitting in two

For most of India’s post-liberalisation history, residential real estate was a volume story. Build as many homes as cheaply as possible, and the market would absorb them. That model worked in an economy where most households earned below ₹15 lakh a year, saved aggressively, and viewed homeownership as the primary financial milestone.

That thesis has broken. The market today is both cooling and booming — depending entirely on which segment you examine.

The mid-range segment (₹50L– ₹1Cr), once the core of India’s housing market, is down 40% year-on-year in sales. Affordable housing has almost disappeared from Tier-1 cities. In contrast, homes priced above ₹1.5 crore are still growing, with the ₹3 – ₹5 crore segment up 14%.

The demand is migrating. The buyer who can afford to buy has moved up the price ladder. The buyer who cannot has been priced out entirely. 

The supply-demand data reinforces this divide. Developers, still operating on the optimism of prior years, continue to launch. But mid-market absorption has slowed. The system is no longer clearing inventory at the same pace.

At the aggregate level, the slowdown is visible.The RBI’s House Price Index shows annual nationwide price growth decelerating from 7% to 2.2% by Q2 FY2025–26. By conventional metrics, momentum has faded. And for a large portion of the market, it has.

But averages mask composition. When high-value transactions dominate deal flow, the average price rises — even if underlying breadth is weakening. That is precisely what we are seeing. Transaction data across leading cities shows rising average ticket sizes, driven by a narrower cohort: GCC professionals, liquidity-rich founders, and HNI investors operating at the premium end.

The buyer profile has fundamentally shifted. Rate-sensitive middle-class demand has retreated. What remains is a thinner, wealthier cohort that is less bothered by EMI calculations and more focused on asset quality, location, and long-term capital appreciation. The market has not crashed. It has simply gotten more exclusive.

The three engines powering the luxury boom

Every market cycle has a structural driver. This one has three, and they are reinforcing each other in ways that I don’t think are fully appreciated yet.

1.The rising income inflection

There is a precise economic threshold behind the luxury housing surge — and it is not arbitrary. Historically, when per-capita GDP sits below $2,500, spending is almost entirely captured by needs: food, basic shelter, and essentials. India currently sits at approximately US$2,500 per capita. We are right at the inflection point.

Once incomes cross the $3,000 mark, the housing and home-upgrade cycle does not grow linearly — it explodes. At this level we see a massive acceleration toward real estate and ancillary segments — including building products and home improvement. This also explains why luxury housing is currently defying broader market trends.

The demand base itself is deepening. India now has over 13 lakh HNIs. And wealth remains highly concentrated — the top 1% of households control nearly 60% of total wealth, according to the Bernstein report 2025. That concentration matters.

Dual-income nuclear families, tech-driven entrepreneurship, and GCC-linked compensation structures are expanding the pool of households with genuine surplus capital. We are moving from a nation of savers to a nation of sophisticated consumers — and that shift is arriving faster than most supply-side analysis accounts for.

2.  The GCC flywheel

A tech lead at a Bengaluru GCC (Global Capability Centres) may earn around ₹25–60 lakh a year. She isn’t buying what her parents bought. She wants a gym, a co-working lounge, EV charging, and smart-home automation. Not as upgrades — as baseline expectations. This demand isn’t aspirational. It is income-driven.

Nearly 2 million people work in India’s GCC today. By 2030, that number will touch 2.8 million. These aren’t back-office roles anymore — global companies are planting their actual nerve centres here. R&D, product, strategy. The GCC count has jumped from 1,285 in 2019 to over 1,700 today, heading past 2,400 by decade’s end.

Bengaluru alone captured more than one-third of the country’s total GCC leasing in 2025.  The flywheel is spinning. And what it’s producing, at scale, is a new kind of homebuyer — one the Indian residential market is still learning to serve.

3. The ESOP and IPO effect

India’s startup ecosystem has quietly created its first generation of genuine early-stage wealth. ESOP liquidations — which we’ve analysed at a ₹14.2 lakh crore opportunity — and IPO proceeds have created a buyer who doesn’t need a 20-year home loan. They can put down 50% upfront or pay outright.

Swiggy’s 2024 IPO alone unlocked $1 billion for over 5,000 employees. Zomato, Nykaa, Policybazaar together added another $3.3 billion. These are not small numbers. A portion of that liquidity is finding its way into real estate — specifically, the premium tier.

This cohort is skipping the starter home entirely and entering the market at the luxury rung. It is a fundamentally new buyer pattern in India.

4. Post-COVID psychological shift 

Post-pandemic, the psychology of the Indian buyer has shifted from need to aspiration. The home is no longer just a place to sleep; it is a multifunctional space that must accommodate a home office, a gym, and a creative studio. 

But it goes deeper than function. There’s an emotional recalibration happening. People who spent months locked inside their homes came out the other side with a sharper sense of what they actually wanted their lives to look like — and the home became the primary canvas for that

Why affordable housing Is quietly disappearing

The affordable segment’s share of demand has collapsed from 52% in 2018 to just 17% today. At the same time, new launches in this category are down 28%.

So It’s not just a demand problem. India has tens of millions of households who want to buy an affordable home. It is a supply problem driven by the economics of building one.

Since 2020, construction costs have surged 35–40%. Land now accounts for 30–50% of total project costs in major cities, and because Indian banks cannot fund land acquisitions, developers borrow privately at 18–22% annual interest. To justify that cost of capital, they must build units commanding a high per-square-foot price.

The government’s own definition of “affordable housing” — capped at ₹45 lakh — has become dangerously outdated. Finding a decent 2BHK below that threshold in Bengaluru, Pune, or Delhi NCR is nearly impossible today. Yet cross that threshold and developers lose their GST benefit, dropping from 1% to 5%. With margins already thin, the rational decision is to stop building.

The deeper consequence is urban stratification. Essential workers are being pushed to the periphery, commuting further for the same jobs that are generating the luxury demand they cannot access. 

Why can’t we just build more?

The constraint in India is not land. It is a lack of FSI — Floor Space Index, the ratio which determines how much can be built on a plot. And by global standards, India is severely restricted. India’s major cities operate with some of the lowest FSI ceilings in the world.

Low FSI forces sprawl. Developers move outward where land is cheaper, but infrastructure lags. Core city land becomes artificially scarce — and therefore unaffordable.

And when core-city supply is structurally constrained and ownership becomes unaffordable, households don’t disappear — they shift to renting.  Every household priced out of buying becomes a long-term renter. 

Low FSI forces sprawl. Developers move outward where land is cheaper, but infrastructure lags. Core city land becomes artificially scarce — and therefore unaffordable.

And when core-city supply is structurally constrained and ownership becomes unaffordable, households don’t disappear — they shift to renting.  Every household priced out of buying becomes a long-term renter. 

The rent paradox

So If you’re a landlord right now, the headline numbers look excellent. Rents were up 23.6% year-on-year as of Q4 2025. Delhi led at 27.8%, Kolkata at 39.6%, Mumbai at 19.3%. That is extraordinary rent inflation by any measure.

But look past the headline and the picture becomes more nuanced. The cities with the biggest rent jumps are not producing the best rental yields. Mumbai and Bengaluru — where prices have run furthest ahead of rents — are yielding just 3.3 – 3.9%. Chennai, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad, where property hasn’t been bid up as aggressively, offer gross yields above 3.9%.

The real estate truism holds: capital appreciation and rental yield are frequently in tension. When a market runs on price appreciation narratives, buyers pay up for the asset and compress the yield. Right now, India’s tier-1 cities are in that compressed-yield phase.

The structural case for rental demand is solid — India’s urban population is rising, supply is tight, and more middle-class households are choosing to rent as buying becomes unaffordable.

Bigger loans, fewer borrowers

Here is a data point that tells the story of this entire cycle in a single line: India’s home loan market grew from ₹11.9 lakh crore to ₹19.3 lakh crore in four years. Yet the number of unique borrowers actually fell — from 27.3 crore to 26 crore.

The RBI cut the Policy Repo Rate by a cumulative 100 basis points between February and June 2025, bringing home loan rates below 8% for the first time since 2022. This was supposed to be the affordability catalyst. It has not worked in the affordable segment — at least not yet.

Origination value is still growing — up 2.7% in FY25 — but volume has declined 5.4%. What that tells us is unambiguous: loans are getting larger, not more numerous. Credit is concentrating upward into high-income professionals and higher-ticket properties (₹75 lakh and above), while sub-₹35 lakh lending has effectively collapsed.

The rate cuts I feel  have helped sentiment more than they’ve helped affordability. The primary constraint on the affordable segment isn’t the interest rate — it’s the price of the underlying asset. A 50 bps cut does little when property prices are going rising at double-digit rates. 

The banking opportunity hidden inside

For banks, the premiumisation of real estate is actually a tailwind. High-income borrowers have significantly lower default probability, and the shift toward larger loans compensates for lower volume. Gross NPA ratios at Scheduled Commercial Banks fell to 2.22% as of September 2025 — a multi-decade low. Net profit for SCBs reached ₹4.01 lakh crore in FY25, up from ₹3.5 lakh crore the previous year.

The banks with the best exposure to premium mortgages — ₹2 crore and above — are quietly benefiting from the same structural shift that is squeezing affordable housing. Fewer borrowers, larger loans, lower delinquency. It is a better book, even if it is a smaller one.

What does this mean for you?

Every structural shift of this scale creates an investable universe that extends far beyond the obvious play. Most people think of the luxury housing boom and immediately jump to listed real estate developers. That is one part of the picture — but not the most interesting one.

Where the real opportunity sits

Premium Real Estate Developers. Focus on those with strong balance sheets, low debt, and projects concentrated in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and NCR premium micro-markets. The cycle favours execution quality over volume.

Building Materials and Smart Home Tech. As ultra-luxury becomes the baseline expectation, the specification upgrade cycle will run for a decade. Companies supplying smart-home systems, EV charging infrastructure, premium fittings, and wellness amenities are quietly riding this wave.

Buy-to-Let in the Right Micro-Markets. Rental yields in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are currently at 2.5–3.5% — still thin relative to borrowing costs. But in Chennai, Ahmedabad, and select Pune markets, yields above 3.9% are available with realistic appreciation potential. The buy-to-let case in India is becoming real for the first time.

Banks Targeting Premium Mortgages. Lenders with a growing book of ₹2 crore+ loans and sub-2.5% NPA ratios are structurally advantaged. Lower provisions, higher margins, lower volatility.

The common thread across all of these is the same underlying dynamic: purchasing power in Indian urban real estate is concentrating, not diffusing. The investable universe isn’t just the developers — it’s everything that feeds, finances, furnishes, and manages the ecosystem they’re building.

The longer view: space as the scarce resource

There is a structural argument for India’s real estate that goes beyond any single cycle, and I want to leave you with it.

The average Indian currently lives in roughly 130 square feet of built space. The equivalent in smaller Chinese cities is approximately 550 square feet. In the US, it is close to 700 square feet. As incomes rise, people don’t eat meaningfully more food — but they consistently demand more space.

This gap is not going to close quickly. Land constraints, restrictive FSI regulations, and a decade-long underinvestment in affordable supply mean the structural demand for premium residential space will run well beyond this cycle.

The luxury boom isn’t a bubble, in my view. It is the early expression of a permanent recalibration in how India’s professional class thinks about where and how it lives. The question isn’t whether to pay attention to real estate — it’s whether you’re positioned in the right part of the market when the next wave arrives.

In summary

India’s residential real estate market has crossed a threshold from which it will not easily return. The majority of transactions in the top cities are now in the luxury bracket. Affordable supply has structurally collapsed. Rents are rising sharply but yields are compressed in the cities that have appreciated most.

The forces driving this shift — GCC-driven income concentration, ESOP and IPO liquidity, dual-income households, rising HNI counts — are structural, not cyclical. They will not reverse when interest rates move or when markets correct.

For wealth creators, the lens should shift accordingly. This is no longer a market you analyse for affordability metrics. It is a market you analyse for where purchasing power is concentrating, and what ecosystem benefits from that concentration.

The volume story is over. The value story is just beginning.

Disclaimer – The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or recommendation.

I didn’t delete photos. I didn’t transfer files to a hard drive. I simply tapped a button to upgrade my iCloud storage for a few hundred rupees a month.

Later that evening at the office, I was chatting with a few younger team members about random expenses. At some point, we started listing the things they pay for every month: Netflix, Prime, Disney+ Hotstar, Swiggy One, Zomato Gold, Spotify, iCloud, ChatGPT Plus, YouTube Premium, a meditation app, a fitness tracker subscription. One of them counted eleven. Another said he’d stopped counting.

And it hit me — the average urban Indian professional now juggles between 7 and 15 subscriptions. Most of them can’t even list all of them without checking their bank statements.

We’ve quietly crossed a threshold. We no longer buy products. We buy access. And access, by definition, is a lease that never ends. For a wealth creator, the real cost isn’t just the monthly outgo — it’s the systematic erosion of ownership, equity, and terminal value from your personal balance sheet.

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• From ownership to access — How we went from owning everything to subscribing to our own car’s features
• What a ₹8,000/month subscription stack really looks like — A line-by-line breakdown of what the average wealth creator is actually paying for
• The $4.2 billion to $21.5 billion playbook — How Adobe and Apple engineered the most profitable business model shift in corporate history
• The cloud storage trap you can’t escape — Why your phone’s camera is quietly building someone else’s recurring revenue
• The math that should make you uncomfortable — Why your subscriptions are a ₹50 lakh hole in your terminal wealth
• The countermovement — Why recurring-revenue businesses are the best compounders — and how to be on the right side of the equation
• 🔗 Your personal Subscription Audit tool — We’ve built a Google Sheet calculator that tells you exactly what your subscriptions are costing you over 1, 3, and 10 years — and what the same money would grow to as an SIP. Link at the end.

Let’s get into it.

From Ownership to Access

For most of us, wealth always meant something you could point to. The apartment in your name. The car in the driveway. The software licence is in a shrink-wrapped box on your desk. A Patek on your wrist that would outlast you. Ownership was the finish line — it signalled permanence, control, arrival.

That world eroded quietly — one subscription at a time, each one feeling like a fair trade. A little convenience for a little money.

But here’s where the story takes a turn nobody expected. Subscriptions have now moved from digital services into the physical world — into things you’ve already paid for and supposedly own.

Mercedes-Benz now offers “Digital Extras” through the Mercedes me Store. Want to actually use the full horsepower your car’s motor is already capable of producing? That’ll be $60 a month — or $1,950 for a lifetime unlock. The hardware is physically installed in your car. The performance is software-locked behind a paywall. Last year alone, Mercedes made $1 billion in subscription revenue. 

This is the logical endpoint of the subscription economy. It’s not just about content anymore. It’s about paywalling ownership itself.

And in India, this shift is playing out at warp speed. OTT platforms have 600 million-plus viewers. Zomato Gold has crossed 3 million subscribers. Zepto Pass has over 4 million. Digital payment infrastructure — particularly UPI auto-mandates — has made recurring payments nearly invisible. You don’t even feel the money leaving.

India’s subscription economy is projected to reach ₹3.2 Lakh Cr ($374B) by 2033. The Subscription Economy Index — which tracks these businesses — has grown 435% over the last decade, outpacing S&P 500 revenue growth by 5x.

And here’s the part that doesn’t get enough attention: during the worst quarter of the pandemic (Q1 2020), S&P 500 company sales declined 1.9%. Subscription businesses? They grew 9.5%. Netflix revenues climbed 16% year-on-year. Apple’s services revenue jumped 36%. Spotify grew 26%.

The subscription model isn’t a trend. It’s the most resilient business architecture of the last two decades. And that resilience comes directly from your wallet.

What a ₹8,000/Month Subscription Stack Actually Looks Like

Before we go further, let’s get specific. I asked around the office and across our network: what does a typical urban wealth creator’s subscription stack look like?

Here’s what came back — and I suspect this will look uncomfortably familiar:

And this is a conservative estimate. It doesn’t include your car’s connected services subscription, your home security monitoring, any premium LinkedIn or professional memberships, or the annual software licences you’ve probably forgotten about.

McKinsey’s research on subscription consumers found something revealing: the single biggest reason people cancel subscriptions is a price increase — 49% for video services, 38% for music. But the single biggest reason people don’t cancel is pure inertia. Auto-renewal is designed to exploit the gap between intention and action. Freemium models achieve 95-100% customer retention over five years. Not because 95% of users are deeply satisfied — but because cancelling requires active effort, and staying requires none.

We’ll come back to what to do about this. But first, let’s look at the other side of this equation — because the same model that’s quietly draining your bank account is also the single most powerful engine of shareholder value creation in the last decade.

The $4.2 Billion to $21.5 Billion Playbook

In 2011, Adobe was a well-respected but plateauing software company. Revenue: $4.2 billion. The business model was simple: sell Creative Suite for $2,599, wait 18 months, release the next version, hope people upgraded. The problem? Customers were skipping upgrades. Piracy was rampant, and revenue was lumpy. 

In 2013, leadership made a suicidal pivot: they killed perpetual licenses and moved entirely to Creative Cloud subscriptions ($49.99/month). The backlash was immediate — 50,000 customers signed a protest petition and the stock tumbled. Adobe braced for a $200 million revenue gap they called the “valley of death.”

Fast forward to 2024: Adobe generated $21.5 billion in annual revenue. That’s a 5x increase. The stock went from roughly $30 in 2012 to over $600. Creative Cloud now has 37 million paid subscribers and 94% of total sales comes from subscriptions. 

By shifting from ownership to access, Adobe transformed from a $16 billion software firm into a $300 billion tech titan.

Apple tells a similar story. In 2015, Services revenue (iCloud, Music, App Store) was $20 billion; by 2024, it crossed $96 billion. It is now Apple’s second-largest and highest-margin segment.

This reveals a duality every wealth creator must grasp: the same subscription model that acts as a “silent expense” in your personal budget is the most powerful engine of shareholder value today. You’re funding their wealth creation at the expense of your own — unless you’re also investing in the companies that benefit from this shift.

So the real intelligence isn’t in rejecting subscriptions; it’s in recognizing the duality of the model. While it extracts value from consumers, it creates extraordinary wealth for shareholders. The “subscription flywheel” is why Adobe went 20x, Microsoft 10x, and Salesforce 8x.

As an investor, focus on three characteristics of a structural compounder:

• Genuine Pricing Power: Can they hike rates without losing users?
• High Switching Costs: Is your data or workflow “locked in”?
• Expanding Wallet Share: Are they growing revenue per user, not just user count?

The strategy is simple: Cut the subscriptions that drain your capital, and invest in the companies that benefit from everyone else’s inertia.

The Cloud Storage Trap You Can’t Escape

I’ve started calling cloud storage the “Emotional Tax.” We are now the most documented generation in history. Ericsson reports that India leads the world in data consumption at 32 GB per smartphone per month. We shoot 4K videos of our kids and high-res portraits of our meals, and almost none of us ever hit “Delete.”

Meanwhile, what do phone manufacturers do? They push iCloud and Google One as the “solution” — and make it progressively harder to manage storage locally. Apple gives you 5 GB free. Google gives you 15 GB. Both fill up within months for any active user.

And here’s where the lock-in becomes nearly permanent. Once your photos, contacts, notes, WhatsApp backups, and documents live in iCloud or Google One, switching feels impossible. You’re not paying for storage — you’re paying for the fear of losing everything.

India’s personal cloud storage market was valued at $3 billion in FY2024 and is projected to reach $10.9 billion by FY2032, growing at over 17% CAGR. Personal cloud users globally have more than doubled — from 1.1 billion in 2014 to 2.3 billion in 2025. And 71% of consumers say photos are the primary reason they use cloud storage.

The pricing looks small: iCloud+ starts at ₹75/month for 50 GB. Google One starts at ₹59/month for 30 GB (the new Lite plan). But most active users quickly outgrow these entry tiers. A family plan with 200 GB on iCloud is ₹129/month. Google One’s 2 TB plan is ₹1,950/month with AI Pro bundled in.

Here’s what I think will happen over the next five years. As phones get better cameras, as AI generates more content, as we accumulate more digital memories, the average household’s cloud storage bill will quietly climb from ₹100-200/month to ₹500-1,000/month.

And because these services hold your most personal data — your family photos, your children’s milestones — the switching cost isn’t financial. It’s emotional.

This is the subscription trap in its purest form. A product you can’t leave, with a price that only goes up.

The Math That Should Make You Uncomfortable

Let’s look at the numbers that should genuinely bother any serious wealth creator.

Take a modest ₹5,000 a month in “unconscious” subscription leakage — services that don’t add real value to your life. That’s ₹60,000 a year. Sounds manageable, right? Until you look at the opportunity cost.

If you redirected that same ₹5,000 into a simple index SIP earning 12% annual returns over 20 years, the terminal value is approximately ₹50 lakhs. That isn’t a rounding error; it’s a significant chunk of a retirement fund or a child’s education, quietly being converted into someone else’s recurring revenue.

This leakage compounds in the other direction as well. While individual players like Netflix have occasionally slashed prices to capture the Indian mass market (dropping their Premium plan from ₹800 to ₹649 to stay competitive), the broader “subscription stack” is trending upward. Platforms like YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Disney+ Hotstar have implemented price hikes of 12–20% in recent cycles.

This is the Pricing Power Trap: you aren’t just paying for access instead of ownership—the cost of that access keeps rising, and your only leverage is to cancel, which most people won’t do.

There is deep psychological architecture at play. Subscriptions reduce cognitive load and exploit “reward uncertainty”— the same mechanism that makes gambling compelling. You keep paying because you might need it, or simply because you’ve forgotten you’re paying at all. 

While we calculate our leakage, platforms calculate their windfall. According to a joint report from Google, Temasek, and Bain & Compansame, India’s online media revenue is projected to hit $40-50 billion by 2030 — a staggering 5x growth from 2022 levels. With the average Indian spending ~3 hours a day on recreational video, we are witnessing a massive structural transfer of wealth from the Indian household balance sheet to the P&Ls of global tech giants.

The Legacy Gap: What You Can’t Pass On

Here’s a dimension that doesn’t get discussed enough.

If you spent ₹5,000 a month on Kindle Unlimited, Spotify, and Apple TV+ for 30 years, you’d have spent ₹18 lakhs — and leave your children exactly zero books, zero music, and zero films. The moment you stop paying, everything vanishes. No resale. No lending. No inheritance.

84% of US music revenue now comes from streaming. Physical media is under 2% for video. We are in the middle of the largest shift from ownership to access in human history. Your financial assets transfer. Your real estate transfers. Your gold transfers. Your digital subscriptions die with your last payment.

For wealth creators who think carefully about generational transfer, the subscription economy creates a structural hole in your legacy that most people haven’t fully accounted for.

The Subscription Audit: A 4-Step Framework

I’ve built a simple four-question audit framework. Run it once every quarter, and you’ll know exactly where your money is going — and whether it’s working for you.

Q1. The Utility Test: “Have I used this in the last 30 days?” If it’s been dormant for two quarters, cancel it.

Q2. The Replacement Test: “Is there a one-time purchase or free alternative?” Often, a lifetime license or a tool like VLC delivers 80% of the value without the recurring tax.

Q3. The Multiplier Test: “Does this generate income or save meaningful time?” ChatGPT Plus for a CXO is a high-yield investment; a neglected meditation app is just an indulgence.

Q4. The Ownership Test: “Am I renting what I could own?” Shift from “renting” software to owning assets wherever possible to create permanent value.

After running these four questions, one more step: disable auto-pay for high-ticket services. Force yourself to manually approve the expensive ones each cycle. A little friction is the friend of the conscious spender.

🔗 Your Personal Subscription Calculator

We’ve gone one step further. Our team has built a Subscription Audit Calculator — a simple Google Sheet where you can:

✅ Select from a pre-loaded list of 30+ common Indian subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, Zomato Gold, iCloud, ChatGPT, and more)

✅ See your total monthly, annual, and decade-long outgo in one glance

✅ Compare it against what the same amount would grow to as a SIP at 12% returns over 1, 3, and 10 years

✅ Identify which subscriptions fall into each quadrant of the audit framework

[👉 Access the Subscription Audit Calculator here] (Link to Google Sheet)

I’d genuinely recommend spending ten minutes with this. The numbers tend to surprise people.

In Summary

Audit ruthlessly. Use the calculator. The ₹7,000-8,500/month in unconscious outgo is a ₹50 lakh+ terminal wealth gap over 20 years.

Be on the equity side. Own recurring-revenue businesses, not just the memberships.

Watch your cloud bill. It’s the one subscription that only grows — driven by your own content creation.

The most expensive way to live isn’t spending too much. It’s paying for the same thing every month, forever, and building zero equity in the process.

Disclaimer – The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or recommendation.