Apollo 13 never reached the Moon, but it demonstrated a timeless truth: humans do their best thinking when failure is not an option.

By the early 2000s, that spirit seemed lost. Space exploration had become expensive, cautious, and incremental. Then, in 2002, a startup called SpaceX set out to change that. Most experts expected it to fail. Instead, it became the first private company to reach orbit, dock with the International Space Station, land and reuse orbital rockets, and fly astronauts into space. In the process, it cut launch costs by more than 90% and transformed the economics of the industry.

Now SpaceX is attempting another first. On June 12, 2026, it goes public at a record breaking $2 trillion valuation, making it the largest IPO in history, more than double the previous record held by Saudi Aramco in 2019. 

The investment story is straightforward: SpaceX dominates launch services, operates the world’s largest satellite network through Starlink, and is pursuing ambitions that range from Mars colonisation to space-based computing infrastructure.

The harder question is valuation. At $2 trillion, investors are not just paying for what SpaceX has achieved, but for what it might achieve over the coming decades.

This newsletter examines that question: what investors are actually buying, what the numbers look like once the storytelling stops, and whether the market has finally found a fair price for the world’s most ambitious company, or is paying today for a future that may never arrive.

In this edition:

• Why SpaceX is going public now, and why it had no choice
• What the business actually looks like 
• The valuation that even the most optimistic analysts cannot fully justify
• How the IPO has been engineered to look like a success on day one
• What owning SpaceX actually means in terms of control
• How Indian wealth creators should think about it

Why is SpaceX going public now?

For years, Musk insisted that SpaceX would never go public. He argued that public markets focus on quarterly results, while SpaceX was building for decades into the future. As a result, the company stayed private and grew from a $2 billion valuation in 2012 to over $300 billion by 2024 without needing Wall Street.

That changed in 2026 when SpaceX merged with xAI, which had already absorbed X (formerly Twitter). The deal added significant debt ($30 billion) to SpaceX and included financing that effectively made an IPO unavoidable.

On June 12, SpaceX will be listed on Nasdaq at a targeted $2 trillion valuation, making it the largest IPO in history. Interestingly, the filing opens not with revenue figures or profit projections but with a mission statement about extending the light of consciousness to the stars. That phrase appears ten times across 277 pages submitted to the SEC. Investors are being asked to buy into a vision as much as a business.

What SpaceX actually is and how it makes money

Most people think of SpaceX as a rocket company, but the company is actually split into three distinct segments. Understanding each one separately is the way to make sense of everything that follows.

1. Space: Launch Services

This is SpaceX’s original business: building and launching rockets such as Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship. Its breakthrough was rocket reusability, which cut launch costs by roughly 85% and helped SpaceX capture over 80% of global orbital launch mass. 

Despite its engineering success, the segment generated just $4.1 billion in FY25 revenue and grew only 8%, with many launches now dedicated to deploying Starlink satellites.

2. Connectivity: Starlink

Starlink is SpaceX’s growth engine. With 9,600 satellites and 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, it generated $11.4 billion in FY25 revenue, growing 50% year-over-year with a 39% operating margin, making it SpaceX’s most profitable business.

Its biggest advantage is vertical integration: SpaceX launches its own satellites at internal cost, giving Starlink a structural cost advantage over competitors.

3. AI: xAI, Grok & X

In February 2026, SpaceX merged with xAI, Elon’s AI startup. The newest segment combines xAI, Grok, X, and the Colossus data center. It generated $3.2 billion in FY25 revenue but lost $6.3 billion as it invested heavily in AI infrastructure. While xAI is expected to contribute only about $1 billion of 2026 revenue, the deal expanded the company’s growth narrative and helped justify its $1.25 trillion valuation. 

However, a post-filing agreement with Anthropic worth approximately $15 billion annually could rapidly transform the division into SpaceX’s largest business. 

The case for valuation: Justified or not? 

At a $2 trillion valuation and $18.7 billion of revenue, SpaceX is being valued at around 100 times sales. The company also lost $4.9 billion last year. That is the entire valuation debate in one sentence.

To feel what 100 times revenue actually means, consider Walmart. 

The world’s largest company by revenue, profitable for decades, is worth less than half of what SpaceX is asking for on its first day as a public company. 

In May 2025, SpaceX was valued at roughly $350 billion in a private tender offer. By December 2025 that had doubled to $800 billion. The xAI merger in February 2026 pushed it to $1.25 trillion. The IPO filing in April targeted $1.75 trillion. That is a 5x increase in under a year, before a single public earnings report.

So how does a number like $1.75 trillion actually get constructed?

You see, when investment banks value a company for an IPO, they usually break it into different businesses, estimate future revenue or profit for each, apply a valuation multiple, and add everything together. The final number depends heavily on the assumptions used.

The challenge with SpaceX is that there is no clean comparable anywhere in public markets. Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at NYU Stern, who has spent decades valuing companies, has noted that when banks cannot identify a genuine peer for a company, it usually means the valuation is hard to justify. 

Here is what valuation exercise looks like for SpaceX, using the analysis from Meritech Capital:

A sum-of-the-parts analysis helps explain the numbers. According to Meritech Capital, the launch business is worth about $88 billion and Starlink around $371 billion. Together, they account for roughly $460 billion of value. The remaining $1.2 trillion, nearly 70% of the valuation, comes from AI.

That AI valuation rests heavily on a single contract with Anthropic worth about $15 billion annually. Applying a high revenue multiple to that agreement creates much of the division’s value. The challenge is that either party can terminate the contract with 90 days’ notice, and Anthropic is also a direct competitor to Grok.

SpaceX also cites a $28.5 trillion TAM, nearly 30% of global GDP. But large markets do not automatically create large companies. The key question is how much of that opportunity SpaceX can realistically capture, at what margins, and over what timeframe.

However, before forming a negative view, I also went and read the most compelling bull case I could find. The argument is that AI will improve productivity across large parts of the global services economy, law, accounting, healthcare administration, customer support, software development and more, by roughly 10%. Services account for roughly 60% of global economic activity, so $60 trillion. 

If AI improves productivity by 10%, that could create around $6 trillion of additional economic value each year. Under that scenario, a $35-40 trillion valuation for the AI industry may not seem unreasonable. And as a company building critical AI infrastructure, SpaceX could capture a meaningful share of that value.

The problem is timing. Will that value emerge in five years, ten years, or twenty? Small changes in timing have an enormous impact on today’s valuation. That is why the debate is not whether SpaceX is an extraordinary company. It clearly is. The real question is whether it is an extraordinary investment at a $2 trillion valuation.

The IPO is engineered to look like a success

The structure of this IPO helps explain why the stock could perform well initially, even if that says little about its long-term value.

Nasdaq changed its rules to make it easier for SpaceX to enter the Nasdaq-100. Normally a newly listed company has to wait about 3 months before qualifying. SpaceX will be eligible after just 15 trading days. It is also listing only about 4% of its shares publicly, a free float so small that under the old rules it would not have qualified for index inclusion at all.

Once included, index funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 will be forced to buy billions of dollars’
worth of shares regardless of valuation. That means billions of dollars of demand gets created by the rules themselves, not by investors making a deliberate choice

Although only about 4% of SpaceX’s shares will trade publicly, the company has also reserved roughly 30% of that IPO allocation for retail investors, an unusually large share for a company of this size, reflecting the strong enthusiasm surrounding the company and its founder.

Musk and key investors have agreed to a 366-day lockup, double the standard 180 days, and cannot sell a single share for a full year after listing. For a company where the investment story revolves so heavily around one person, that commitment is worth noting.

For everyone else, shares unlock in stages across the first six months rather than all at once, with the first window opening after Q2 earnings between July and September and a second large release after Q3 earnings. Full restrictions lifted around mid-December 2026.

Another detail worth noting is that SpaceX reserved 5% of the IPO for undisclosed insiders with no lockup at all. At this scale of offering, that is not a small number.

The net result is that the stock will face recurring waves of potential selling throughout its first six months, not one cliff in December. Musk staying locked in for a year removes the biggest single risk. Everything else is a rolling test.

The financial picture also deserves attention. SpaceX ended Q1 2026 with $16.6 billion in cash, $29 billion in long-term debt, and a $20 billion bridge loan due within 15 months. Free cash flow was negative $14 billion in FY25 and negative $9 billion in Q1 alone, making continued execution and access to capital critical.

More broadly, the IPO highlights how much influence index providers now have over capital allocation. In the past, investors decided where money flowed. Today, inclusion in a major index can generate billions of dollars of demand automatically.

SpaceX may be the clearest example yet. The IPO will likely look successful. The more interesting question is how much of that success comes from investors choosing to buy the stock, and how much comes from a system that requires them to.

The Elon Musk Risk: Shareholder’s Ownership

Musk owns about 44% of SpaceX’s economic interest but controls roughly 85% of the voting power. In 2025, his salary was just $54,080. Instead, his compensation is tied almost entirely to long-term goals. In early 2026, he was granted 1 billion performance-based shares that vest only if SpaceX reaches massive valuation milestones and succeeds in building a permanent human settlement on Mars.

A month later, he received another 302 million shares tied to building non-Earth data centres capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute power, a target thousands of times larger than today’s biggest AI infrastructure projects.

The message is clear: Musk is not building SpaceX for the next few years. He is building it for outcomes that could take decades. Whether that is exciting or concerning depends on your perspective as an investor.

The filing also states that there is no expectation Musk will prioritise SpaceX over his other companies. History makes this difficult to judge. Many investors spent years arguing that Tesla was overvalued and were right about the numbers but wrong about the outcome.

The safest position may be neither blind optimism nor outright skepticism, but patience, waiting for a price that reflects what the business earns today, not just what it could become tomorrow.

Why SpaceX’s $600M Bitcoin holdings matter

One detail worth knowing before investing is SpaceX’s Bitcoin holdings. According to on-chain data, the company owns about 8,285 Bitcoin worth roughly $600 million, making it one of the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holders.

What’s notable is that SpaceX has continued to hold the position despite reporting a large loss and negative free cash flow. That suggests management views Bitcoin as a long-term strategic asset rather than a source of liquidity.

For investors, the bigger issue is earnings volatility. Once public, SpaceX will have to report Bitcoin at fair value each quarter. If Bitcoin falls sharply, reported earnings could take a significant hit even if the core rocket, satellite, and AI businesses perform well. If Bitcoin rises, earnings could get an equally significant boost.

In short, future SpaceX earnings will be influenced not only by launches and Starlink growth, but also by Bitcoin’s price movements.

How Indian wealth creators should think about it

A significant portion of this $2 trillion is a personality premium. That premium is real, it sustained Tesla through multiple near-death experiences, but personality premiums are also the first thing to compress when sentiment shifts, and they cannot be quantified in any financial model.

Consider what this IPO means in terms of one man’s concentration of market value. Tesla plus SpaceX at IPO valuation equals $3.5 trillion, the fourth largest combined entity on earth, behind only Nvidia, Alphabet, and Apple. One person would control two of the five most valuable companies in the world. That is not a reason to avoid SpaceX. It is a risk factor that deserves to sit clearly in your mind before you decide how much of your portfolio to allocate.

Before making any decision, consider three questions

1. What are you actually buying? Is it Starlink, the AI business, or the Musk vision? Each deserves a different valuation and carries a different risk profile, yet the IPO packages them together at a single price.
   
2. How much Musk exposure do you already have? Investors who own Tesla directly or through global technology funds already carry significant Musk-related risk. Adding SpaceX increases that concentration more than many realise.
   
3. What is your entry point? Buying at the IPO and buying after major lockup expiries are very different investments that could come with very different prices and risk-reward profiles.

For those who want exposure to this theme without the full SpaceX premium, Alphabet owns approximately 7 to 8% of SpaceX, a position worth around $60 billion at IPO valuation, and also holds a significant stake in Anthropic. It trades at 19 times earnings with its own AI infrastructure, autonomous vehicle, and cloud businesses already generating cash. 

It is not a pure play. But for a time-poor investor who does not want to actively manage a speculative single-stock position, it gives you the upside of the theme without requiring you to buy at the moment of maximum enthusiasm.

The Verdict

Historically, major IPO waves have often appeared near market peaks. In 1999, more than 400 companies went public just before the Nasdaq fell 78%. Companies tend to list when investor enthusiasm and valuations are at their highest.

SpaceX is not one of hundreds of speculative IPOs. But at a $2 trillion valuation, it is large enough to absorb enormous amounts of capital at a time when excitement around AI and technology is already elevated.

The history of large tech IPOs is worth sitting with for a moment before deciding how excited to be.  Of the 25 biggest technology IPOs globally, 16 traded below their debut-day closing price within 12 months. The median decline was about 22%. Facebook and Alibaba both fell around 30% in their first year as public companies. Snap lost more than half its value before eventually recovering, while Uber dropped from its $45 IPO price to below $30 within months. 

The ones that held up, Google, Amazon, did so because they were already profitable and growing when they listed.

Today, many investors are heavily concentrated in AI stocks. SpaceX arrives with an equally compelling story. Some money may shift from AI stocks into SpaceX. If that happens, it could put pressure on AI stocks as investors redirect capital elsewhere.

And if SpaceX disappoints after listing, investors may begin questioning not just this company, but the broader willingness to pay extreme valuations for future growth.

But how much of the market gets affected depends on one key difference between this cycle and the last one.

The dot-com bubble was funded almost entirely by public capital flowing into companies with no revenue. The largest AI spenders today, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, are highly profitable companies funding AI investments with their own cash rather than relying on public markets for survival.

That does not eliminate risk entirely. The AI ecosystem has become deeply interconnected, with chipmakers, cloud providers, model developers, and infrastructure companies all dependent on one another’s success. SpaceX at $2 trillion would become another major piece of that ecosystem.

None of this suggests the technology is overhyped. SpaceX has already achieved extraordinary things, from transforming launch economics to building the world’s largest satellite network.

The question is valuation .A great tech and a great investment are not always the same thing and they are especially not the same thing when every optimistic scenario is already reflected in the price before the company has earned a single dollar of profit from its most expensive bets.

If markets eventually correct, as they always do, the conversation around a $2 trillion valuation may look very different. Sometimes the best investment decision is simply to wait.

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 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.

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 asset class at the centre of this was Private Credit, a market that barely existed 20 years ago and is now worth more than $2 trillion. And here is how it got there.

After the 2008 financial crisis, banks became much stricter about lending. Mid-sized companies still needed capital, so private credit funds stepped in. They raised money from large institutional investors, pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, who were willing to lock their capital away for several years in exchange for returns of 8 to 12% annually, well above what bonds or deposits could offer at the time.

For a long time, it worked well. But then two things changed.

First, interest rates rose sharply after 2022. Since most private credit loans have floating rates, borrowing costs went up quickly, putting pressure on companies that had taken those loans.

Second, many US private credit funds had large exposure to mid-sized software companies. AI disrupted parts of that sector faster than expected, making some business models look weaker overnight.

When both problems hit at once, investors rushed to withdraw their money. But many funds had promised quarterly withdrawals even though their loans were locked in for 4–5 years. So when too many investors pulled out at once, a bank run on the fund, the funds ran out of cash and froze withdrawals.

That mismatch triggered the freeze. But most coverage missed that private credit isn’t one market, it’s six different strategies with very different risks. The affected funds mainly lent to software startups, loss-making firms, and stressed businesses dependent on uncertain future outcomes.  

But there is one sub category of private credit that works very differently. It lends only to stable, operating businesses with real revenues, real assets, and a clear ability to repay. It’s called Performing Credit. That’s what this edition covers.

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• What Private Credit is and how the three-player system works
• Where it sits in the investment universe relative to every other asset class
• The six strategies within Private Credit, and where Performing Credit fits in
• How Performing Credit compares across the risk-return curve
• How fast is India’s Private Credit market growing, and what’s being funded
• Who is this for and how to access this asset class as an investor
• Top funds in India and key things to consider before investing 

How Private Credit actually works

Picture a mid-size Indian pharmaceutical company that needs ₹200 crore to acquire a competitor. The deal needs to close in eight weeks. Their bank says the process takes four months and the structure doesn’t fit standard lending templates. The public bond market requires a credit rating and a roadshow that would take just as long. Neither option works.

A private fund closes the deal in three weeks. The loan is negotiated directly between the borrower and the fund, terms, repayment schedule, security package, everything built around the company’s actual cash flows rather than a bank’s checklist. The borrower gets the capital and the fund earns 14 to 16% annually, secured against hard assets and promoter pledges.

The diagram below shows how the money actually moves.

Three parties make every deal work. 

1. The borrower is usually a mid-sized company with steady cash flows that needs money for an acquisition, expansion, refinancing, or other business needs that banks either can’t support or won’t move quickly enough on.
   
2. The fund pools capital from investors, underwrites the loan directly, negotiates the terms, and holds it to maturity.
   
3. The investor is whose capital is being deployed, historically this was institutions like pension funds, insurance companies, endowments. In India today, it increasingly includes HNIs and family offices, with a minimum ticket of ₹1 crore.

These investments happen through a SEBI-regulated structure called an Alternative Investment Fund, or AIF. SEBI created the AIF category to bring some order to investments that sit outside mutual funds and direct equity. They come in three types. Category I backs startups, infrastructure, and social ventures. Category III uses complex strategies involving leverage and derivatives. Category II is where private credit funds live. All these categories are closed-ended and accessible only to investors who meet SEBI’s criteria.

What are the different types of Private Credit and that difference matters

Private credit is a broad term that covers very different kinds of lending. Before understanding where Performing Credit fits, it helps to see the full picture of what private credit actually covers.

Direct lending, loans to mid-market companies with proven cash flows, dominates globally at 52% of AUM and is the foundation of India’s private credit market. 

Asset-based finance on the other hand lends against physical collateral rather than the company itself, offering lower yields but hard security. 

Then there are strategies like venture debt, which lends to early-stage startups with little or no cash flow, and distressed debt, which lends to companies already under financial stress. These can generate higher returns, but they also come with much higher risk and require a very different kind of expertise to manage well.

That is where Performing Credit stands apart, it focuses on lending to businesses that are still healthy, generating cash flows, and making regular repayments.

Many people may assume Performing Credit is just another name for Private Credit. But Performing Credit is a specific sub-category that lends exclusively to financially stable, operating businesses with real cashflows, hard collateral, and structured repayment. The borrower is a company that is doing well and needs capital to grow, not a startup burning cash, and not a distressed company hoping to turn around.

Most of the stress making headlines in the US right now is concentrated in venture debt and special situations, the higher-risk end of private credit. Performing credit sits at the other end of the spectrum entirely.

Where performing credit sits in the risk-return landscape

Performing credit doesn’t force you to choose between safety and returns. Instead, it sits in a unique space outside traditional public market investments, offering a balance of risk and reward.

When building a fixed income portfolio in India today, the trade-off is mainly between risk and return. Bank and corporate FDs typically offer around 7–8% with low risk. Debt mutual funds are in a similar range. A-to-AA rated bonds can generate 9–12% returns with moderate risk. At the higher end, venture debt and distressed credit strategies may offer 16–22% yields, but the risk involved is significantly higher.

Performing credit sits between those two poles, aiming to deliver roughly 14-16% gross yields at moderate risk levels, similar to A or AA-rated bonds, but with relatively higher returns.

That reason being that these funds negotiate directly with borrowers, moving faster than banks and with more flexibility than public bond markets. That speed and customisation commands a premium. And since these loans are usually held until maturity instead of being traded daily in the market, returns are less affected by short-term volatility.

Why India’s Private Credit market exists, and why it’s growing so fast

Many investors worry that the problems seen in global private credit markets could eventually spread to India. But India’s market has been built very differently.

In India, performing credit is mainly offered through SEBI-regulated Category II AIFs. These are closed-ended funds, which means investors cannot redeem or withdraw money midway. That structure helps avoid the liquidity problems that created stress in parts of the US private credit market. Regulations around leverage are also stricter, and better-quality funds usually have stronger collateral and tighter lending terms.

What’s worth understanding, though, is that locked-up does not mean frozen. Capital is drawn in tranches over roughly the first year, quarterly interest distributions begin flowing from Year 1, and principal starts returning as loans mature through Years 2 to 4. The 6-year fund life is the outer envelope, not the average experience so the effective duration on your capital is closer to 3 to 3.5 years, making this a medium-term commitment rather than the long lock-in.

But the bigger story is growth. 

India’s private credit market is still small relative to the economy. Private credit is around 0.6% of GDP in India, compared to about 3.8% in the US, showing how early the market still is. As banks tighten lending and companies look for faster, more flexible funding, private credit is becoming a bigger part of financing in India.

In 2025, India saw $12.4 billion in private credit deals, up 35% from 2024. The market has grown more than 10x from around $600 million annually in 2012. Real estate makes up about 42% of deal activity, while healthcare and industrial products account for roughly 15% each. 

Earlier, private credit in India was dominated by global firms like Blackstone, Ares Management, Farallon Capital, and Värde Partners. But that is changing. Domestic funds now make up 64% of deal value and 69% of deal volume, showing that Indian managers have built strong underwriting capabilities and local expertise.

A major reason India’s performing credit market could grow was the introduction of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) in 2016. Before the IBC, recovery cases could drag on for years if a borrower defaulted. The IBC created a faster, time-bound recovery process and gave lenders stronger legal protection. Since then, creditors have recovered over $44 billion, and resolution rates have improved sharply.

More than anything else, the IBC gave lenders confidence. It made lending beyond just the safest companies feel like a viable business, not a game of chance.

Who should consider this asset class?

Performing Credit tends to work best for investors who already have their core portfolio in place, equities, debt, real estate, and are looking for a source of income that is less tied to daily market movements.

They understand that locking money in for 3 to 5 years is part of the trade-off for earning higher yields than bonds or fixed deposits. They are not chasing maximum returns. They want steady income, predictable cash flows, and exposure to India’s mid-market corporate credit space, an area most portfolios usually miss.

In terms of risk, performing credit sits somewhere in the middle. You are lending money, not buying equity. Your returns depend on whether the borrower can generate enough cash flow to repay the loan, not on stock prices rising. That is why the quality of the borrower, the collateral, and the fund manager’s discipline are so important.

But it is not suitable for everyone. If you may need your money back in 2–3 years, if your portfolio is still not diversified, or if you are only attracted by the high yield without understanding the lock-in and illiquidity, this is probably not the right fit.

Here are two ways to access it  

1. There are two routes into performing credit: Investing directly into individual credit deals alongside institutional lenders.The advantage is transparency, you know where your money is going, can negotiate terms directly, and avoid fund fees. But the downside is concentration risk. A direct portfolio may have only 8–12 loans, so even one bad loan can hurt returns. Evaluating these deals also requires deep financial, legal, and collateral analysis, which usually needs institutional expertise.

2. Performing credit fund, a SEBI-regulated Category II AIF where a professional manager handles the sourcing, underwriting, portfolio management, and ongoing monitoring. You get diversification across 15 to 25 deals, professional oversight, and a structured legal framework. The trade-off is fees, access quality, and the challenge of choosing the right fund, which is harder than it looks.

The table below shows India’s top 24 private credit lenders by deployment volume in H1 2025.

If you look at the large private credit funds like Farallon Capital, Ares Management, BlackRock, PIMCO, and Bain Capital, they mainly raise money from institutions, making access difficult for most individual investors.

Even in India, funds like Kotak, 360 ONE, Neo Asset Management, and InCred often offer better terms to larger investors. Smaller investors may face higher fees and less visibility into underlying deals. And while many funds look similar on paper, understanding borrower quality, collateral, and repayment history requires deep diligence.

So before committing to any fund, there are two sets of questions worth going through, one for yourself, one for the relationship manager/wealth manager.

At Dezerv, Performing Credit is typically considered for clients with portfolios above ₹5 crore. Below that, the allocation often becomes impractical.* 

In conclusion

India’s performing credit market is growing and the long-term opportunity is significant. But accessing it properly requires more work than simply investing in a mutual fund. You need strong deal sourcing, disciplined underwriting, good collateral structures, reasonable fees, and the patience to stay invested through a 3-4 year fund cycle.

The investors who do this well are usually the ones who treat performing credit as a thoughtful portfolio allocation, not just a way to chase higher yields. They understand where the returns come from, what risks they are taking, and what trade-offs they are making.

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 of the financial strategies, instruments and portfolios 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 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.

We had four panels covering conversations ranging from geopolitics and market cycles, to asset allocation frameworks, to the ESOP wealth phenomenon, to where income-seeking investors should actually be looking in 2026.

The panelists were some of the sharpest minds in Indian finance:

In today’s edition, I’ve distilled the most important insights from each panel, the kind of thinking that doesn’t make it into a news headline or a 30-second market update. 

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• Why the biggest investing risk in India is staying out
• The one behavioral mistake that costs you more than bad stock picks
• What the ESOP conversation most people are not having
• Where the equity opportunity is actually hiding right now
• A simple framework for income investing in 2026

The market is messier than the headlines suggest and that’s the opportunity

Prashant Jain opened the evening with something every nervous investor in the room needed to hear right now, given how uncertain and unsettling the last 18 months have felt: pessimists sound smarter, but optimists make money.

His view on the current environment was nuanced in a way that I found genuinely reassuring. Yes, oil is elevated, FIIs have been selling, and there is real pressure on the balance of payments. But when you actually break down why FIIs have been selling over the last two years, it tells a very different story from the panic the headlines suggest. First India got too expensive relative to other emerging markets. Then money rotated into AI-driven markets like Taiwan and Korea. And most recently, the selling has been currency-related hedging driven by geopolitical uncertainty. Three distinct, explainable chapters, none of which touch the underlying trajectory of India’s corporate earnings or economic growth.

On where returns go from here, he made a case that is worth paying attention to. After 18 months of correction, Nifty valuations have fallen below fair value, and India’s earnings are still compounding at 11-12% a year. If valuations recover even modestly while earnings keep growing, Nifty can compound at 14% over the next 3 years. 

Another observation that stayed with me wasn’t even about markets. It was about  blue-collar wages. A gym trainer or a plumber in a large Indian city today earns close to what an entry-level white-collar professional makes. Most people frame this as a problem, stagnating white-collar salaries, but he reframed it entirely. India’s consumption pool isn’t narrowing but it is broadening. More people have purchasing power today than ever before. And over any meaningful period of time, markets follow the economy.

The one thing that will cost you more than a bad fund pick

The asset allocation panel was the most practically useful conversation of the evening, and the insight I’d carry into any portfolio review was this: switching funds too often hurts long-term returns more than choosing the wrong fund.

And Kalpen Parekh put a number to it. If you invest ₹100 at 10% compounding for 20 years, your corpus at the end is ₹555. Make just one fund switch at the 10-year mark, even if the new fund performs identically, and that corpus becomes ₹330. The tax drag and the timing cost compound silently, invisibly, devastatingly.

His framework for navigating uncertainty was refreshingly honest: we are in the middle. Not very cheap, not very expensive. Nobody knows which direction markets move from here over the next six months.

The framework he shared was simple enough to actually use:

On the last point, and the one that matters most, the debt allocation. Kalpen made a point that may sound counterintuitive at first: if you want to earn equity returns over a long period, you need debt in your portfolio. Not because debt outperforms equity, but because most people simply cannot stomach volatility. Debt is what keeps you invested through a correction instead of panic-selling at the bottom. The behavioral anchor is worth more than any marginal return difference between funds.

Rajeev Radhakrishnan added the macro context: India’s fiscal deficit consolidated from 13% of GDP during COVID to roughly 7.5% today, while RBI simultaneously raised rates by 400 basis points. Two major brakes on the economy applied at the same time. Both are now being released, which means the cyclical setup for equity earnings is improving underneath all the noise about geopolitics.

The ESOP conversation most Bengaluru professionals are not having

I spoke at the third panel, on ESOPs, a topic close to home for this audience. And the number I opened surprised people: in a survey we ran across roughly 800 professionals, over 80% did not fully understand the basic mechanics of their own ESOP grant.

Vesting schedules, strike prices, exercise windows, perquisite tax at exercise, most people holding meaningful ESOP wealth could not clearly explain how their own grant worked. And yet, for a large number of people in that room, ESOPs represent the most significant wealth creation event of their professional lives.

Here’s the framing I find most useful for thinking about concentration risk. If someone handed you ₹100 today and asked you to invest it, would you put ₹80 of it into a single stock? Almost no one says yes to that question. But that is exactly the situation most ESOP holders are in after a buyback or an IPO.

The right response is a staggered exit plan, not trying to time the stock, but committing to a mechanical reduction in concentration over a defined period. If 80% of your net worth sits in one company’s stock, plan to bring it to 20% over two years, reducing in equal parts each quarter. It removes the timing pressure and the emotional weight of the decision.

A few other things I see people get wrong:

The tax hesitation trap: People hold concentrated positions too long because they don’t want to pay capital gains tax. But tax is on profit. Paying tax means you made money. The risk of not paying tax is losing the wealth entirely, as employees of some very well-known companies discovered the hard way.

The real estate overextension: The most common post-IPO mistake is going all-in on real estate immediately. Buying the home you want to live in is a perfectly fine decision. But we see people use an ESOP windfall as the occasion to over-leverage into investment property, before thinking through their actual financial plan.

And the number that most people miss: On the day you exercise ESOPs, the difference between strike price and market price is taxed as perquisite, at your marginal income tax rate, which in a windfall year is often 42%. The actual wealth in your hand is meaningfully less than the headline number on the grant letter.

Sectors worth watching right now

The equities panel was less about macro trends and more about where fund managers are actually investing today. And the takeaway was interesting: many sectors that have done poorly for years are starting to look attractive again.

A big reason is that midcap valuations may not be as expensive as they seem. New-age companies now make up a large part of the index, and many of them are either loss-making or trading at very high valuations. That pushes the overall index valuation higher and hides the cheaper opportunities underneath.

Fund managers highlighted eight sectors where valuations have fallen because of weak cycles, not because the businesses are broken: IT, banking, energy, metals, chemicals, textiles, FMCG, and cement.

Chemicals stood out as one of the strongest opportunities. Chinese competition has pressured Indian manufacturers for years, but conditions are changing. The yuan has strengthened, logistics costs from China have risen sharply, and China has removed export rebates on many chemical products. That is improving the position of Indian companies.

Precision engineering and aerospace were also discussed as long-term opportunities because once companies get certified, revenue visibility becomes strong. Thermal power ancillaries are seeing renewed interest as India leans more on coal. And in metals, some investors prefer derivative businesses like grinding media and explosives rather than commodity producers themselves.

Consumer stocks are also looking more attractive than they have in years. Some companies now offer 4-5% free cash flow yields, something rarely seen during the previous bull market.

The broader message from the panel was simple: there is a huge gap between winners and losers in the market right now. Some stocks are up 30-40% this year, while others are down 20-30%. Global sentiment toward India is also very weak at the moment. Historically, periods of high pessimism and wide valuation gaps have been good environments for stock pickers.

Income investing in 2026: What actually works

The last panel was the one closest to where most of our clients actually live, not building wealth anymore, but managing it, protecting it. Making it work without taking on more risk than necessary.

We are in Bengaluru, so real estate came up early. And the version of that conversation is more nuanced than the usual “buy property, it always goes up” narrative. The math on a well-researched apartment in the right micro-market actually works, 7-8% rental yield once the property is tenanted, plus 5-6% annual price appreciation gets you to 12-13% total return. But that math is built on one condition: you did your homework before buying, not after. In an oversupplied micro-market, at peak prices, every number in that equation changes.

What I found more interesting was the conversation around where people are chasing yield and what they are not fully understanding about the risks they are taking on. Private credit products promising 16-18% returns have seen enormous inflows. And the question worth asking is simple –  if debt is supposed to be the safe part of your portfolio, what does it mean when your debt is yielding more than equity has historically? You are not getting a free lunch. You are taking on credit risk and liquidity risk at the same time, often without realising it. The right mental model for any income product is safety first, liquidity second, return third. In that order. Most people have it exactly backwards.

And the most forward-looking part of the conversation was around Specialised Investment Funds (SIF’s), a relatively new regulatory category that sits between mutual funds and PMS structures. More flexibility than a mutual fund, more transparency and accessibility than a PMS. For someone looking for tax-efficient income or a structured multi-asset allocation, this is a space worth paying attention to as it matures. New SIF and hybrid products can deliver 8–9% returns more tax efficiently than regular debt funds. If you hold certain hybrid categories for 2 years, tax falls to around 12.5%. 

Before I sign off

Three hundred and fifty people showed up on a Wednesday night in Bengaluru to think carefully about how they build and protect wealth. That is not a small thing, and it is not something I take for granted.

The markets are noisy right now and the list of things to worry about is long. But what stayed consistent across every panel, every speaker, every conversation was this: structure matters more than prediction, and discipline compounds faster than intelligence. India’s long-term story, for all its near-term turbulence, remains one of the most compelling wealth-creation environments in the world. We just have to stay in the game long enough to benefit from it.

To every panelist who gave the room their most honest thinking, and to everyone who showed up and stayed for the entire evening –  thank you. Conversations like this are why we built Dezerv, and nights like this remind me exactly why it matters.

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The views and opinions expressed are those of the respective individual and do not reflect or represent the views and position of Dezerv Investments Pvt. Ltd. or its affiliates (collectively “Dezerv”). The information contained herein is for informational purposes only and should not be interpreted as soliciting, advertising, or providing any advice. Any statement about the future developments or returns are speculative and should not be taken as guarantees.

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.All trademarks, logos and brand names are the property of their respective owners. All company and product names used herein are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, trademarks and brand logos does not imply endorsement. Neither Dezerv nor its affiliates assume any responsibility for actions taken based on the information provided herein.

The experiment was a disaster at first. Cards were stolen, fraud surged, and losses mounted. The programme nearly collapsed. But Bank of America kept going, expanded across the country, and BankAmericard eventually became what the world now knows as Visa. What began as a risky experiment in one California city became the backbone of global commerce.

The reason I am thinking about Fresno this week is a conversation in our office about people planning summer travel, comparing business class upgrades, checking lounge access, and figuring out whether their hotel points were still valid. It struck me how different this would have sounded a decade ago. Back then, credit cards in India were mostly about credit. Today, for a growing group of professionals, they are about spending strategically.

India now has 118 million credit cards in circulation and annual spending of ₹23.62 trillion, roughly ₹2 lakh per card each year on average. But the premium cards covered in this newsletter operate at a very different level. Cards like Infinia, Magnus Burgundy, and HSBC Premier often require ₹10–35 lakh in annual spending to truly justify their fees and benefits.

These users are a tiny fraction of India’s cardholders, but they account for a disproportionate share of spending. And yet, more than 50% of reward points in India still go unredeemed every year. This newsletter looks at a simple question: after years of changing reward structures and devaluations, how much value are people actually getting from all that spending?

In this edition:

• How India’s credit card market tripled in value, and what that growth quietly cost existing cardholders
• Who actually funds your rewards every time you swipe
• Why banks are cutting benefits even as they sign up millions of new customers
• The privileges premium cardholders still have access to, and the ones that have quietly disappeared
• A comparison of the six premium cards that matter most right now
• How to earn the rewards the right way
• Tools and people worth following if you want to go deeper

How India’s credit card market tripled in five years

India’s credit card market has gone through a fundamental transformation over the last five years that most people have not fully absorbed. Transaction volumes have doubled, from 2,087 million in 2019 to 4,472 million in 2024, while transaction value has nearly tripled from ₹7.1 trillion to ₹20.4 trillion. At the same time, debit card volumes have collapsed by 65%.

What happened is straightforward once you see it. UPI absorbed everything small and daily, the morning chai, the auto fare, the grocery run, and did it so seamlessly that carrying cash or swiping a debit card became unnecessary for most urban Indians. Credit cards moved in the opposite direction, claiming the high-value lane: flights, hotels, large appliances, luxury retail, international dining, and the kind of aspirational spending that a younger, more confident professional class was increasingly comfortable putting on credit. 

The EMI culture did the rest, allowing large purchases to sit comfortably across monthly installments without the friction of a formal bank loan. India has graduated from a country that viewed credit with suspicion to one that has made it a lifestyle instrument.

But rewards are shrinking as the market grows

India’s credit card market has grown rapidly, but most of that growth has come from new users entering the system, not from existing users spending more. But rewards programmes have become much less profitable for banks.

First, defaults are rising. Credit card NPAs rose 28.4% in the year ending December 2024, increasing lending costs for banks.

Second, RBI regulations have become stricter. Banks now need to hold more capital against credit card loans, leaving less room to fund generous rewards.

Third, fewer people are carrying unpaid balances month to month. Before the pandemic, over 40% of users revolved their balances. Today that number is closer to 23–25%, meaning banks earn less high-interest income that once funded rewards.

UPI has added more pressure. RuPay credit cards linked to UPI now account for a large share of transactions, but payments below ₹2,000 carry almost no interchange fee, reducing income for banks.

Put together, the economics of generous rewards programmes no longer work the way they once did. So banks kept acquiring new users while quietly reducing benefits for existing ones. Lounge access now comes with spending thresholds, cashback caps are lower, transfer partners disappear more often, and reward points expire faster than before.

Privileges premium credit card holders still have access to

Banks have mostly cut the benefits that were automatic, free lounge entry, uncapped cashback, airline partners. What they have not cut are the benefits most cardholders never used in the first place. Travel insurance, hotel memberships, golf privileges, these are still sitting in your card, largely untouched.

The table above shows the top six cards, but the real question is not which card is best, it is whether your points are spread across enough banks that one programme changing its terms does not leave you stranded.  Most people use one credit card for everything because it is simple. But that usually means missing out on rewards. Different cards are good for different categories. A flight booked through HDFC Infinia’s SmartBuy portal can earn far higher rewards (33%)  than booking the same ticket on a regular card (3%). Some cards are also much better for categories like jewellery, dining, or travel.

A simple habit helps: pick your four biggest spending categories and use the best card for each one.

It is also worth tracking annual spending milestones. Cards like HDFC Diners Black offer bonus points once you cross certain spending thresholds.  HDFC Diners Black, for example, gives 10,000 bonus points every quarter when you spend ₹4 lakh, points that can be worth more than several months of everyday earnings.

If you are close to hitting a milestone near the end of your card year, shifting a month of spending to that card can unlock rewards worth far more than the extra spend needed.

What if you lose your card?

Metal cards cost more to replace than you might expect. HDFC charges ₹3,500 to replace a lost or damaged Infinia or Diners Black Metal, a figure that caused significant backlash in the community when it was introduced. ICICI charges the same ₹3,500 for the Emeralde Private Metal. The fee was widely believed to target people replacing cards to access new Visa offers rather than genuine loss cases, and the community’s view is that a genuine fraud or theft reported immediately is likely to get the fee waived if you push for it.

Your accumulated points are safe. Replacing a card does not wipe your reward balance, points transfer to the new card.

The bigger problem is timing. Losing an Indian premium card while traveling abroad means waiting for the replacement to arrive at your home address in India. Someone then has to courier it to you. If you travel frequently and rely on one primary card, keeping a backup card from a different bank active is worth doing.

Tools worth bookmarking

1) Points.casa transfer calculator: Shows exactly how many miles you get when moving points between programmes. Before deciding whether to transfer Magnus points to KrisFlyer or Skywards, run the comparison here first.points.casa/tools/transfer-calculator

2) SaveSage rewards calculator: Plug in your card and spend pattern and it shows what you are actually earning versus what a different card would give you. Useful before renewing any card. savesage.club/credit-card-rewards-calculator

3) Seats.aero: For finding award seat availability. Instead of checking each airline website individually, Seats.aero shows live availability across all programmes in one search. The web version is far more powerful than the app. At roughly $10 a month, the Pro tier pays for itself on a single booking. seats.aero

People worth following (for updates on credit cards)

1) Great Indian Points and Miles Show 

2) Suvan Dural Jha I _djsuvan_

3) Manasi Jaiswal and Sanket Garg I Dobaniye

4) Aly Hajiani I thatcreditcardguy

5)Akash I  https://x.com/ccg33k

In summary

India’s credit card market has never been larger, and the engineering behind premium rewards has never been more deliberately tiered. Banks are concentrating the best benefits at the top of the spend ladder, which means the gap between cardholders who understand the system and those who do not has widened considerably. The ones who understand it are extracting disproportionate value: free business class seats, hotel upgrades, forex savings running into tens of thousands on a single trip. Everyone else is paying ₹12,000 to ₹66,000 in annual fees for benefits that changed

In summary

India’s credit card market has never been larger, and the engineering behind premium rewards has never been more deliberately tiered. Banks are concentrating the best benefits at the top of the spend ladder, which means the gap between cardholders who understand the system and those who do not has widened considerably. The ones who understand it are extracting disproportionate value: free business class seats, hotel upgrades, forex savings running into tens of thousands on a single trip. Everyone else is paying ₹12,000 to ₹66,000 in annual fees for benefits that quietly changed while they were not looking.

But here is what I actually meant, and why the context changes everything.

Retirement planning is one of the most personal financial decisions you will ever make. ₹40 crore is not a number for every Indian. It is the approximate corpus that someone who is 40 today, spending ₹2 lakh a month, retiring at 60 in 2046 and planning to live until 90, would need to sustain their current lifestyle across a 30-year retirement. Change any one of those variables and the number changes entirely.

It’s not about ₹40 crore. It’s about doing the math honestly with the right inputs, something most people skip. They pick a number that feels ambitious and assume it’ll work. History suggests it won’t, and that is what this newsletter is actually about.

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• Why the retirement shortfall is a pattern
• What 51 years of government data tells us about what inflation actually costs you
• A simple way to calculate the corpus you personally need
• Why building the corpus and making it last are two completely different problems
• The three phases of retirement, and how to structure your withdrawal across all of them

Let’s begin.

The number you’re chasing has always been wrong

Picture a family in 1986. Both partners are working, they are careful with money, and someone they trust, a family advisor, an elder, a colleague, tells them that ₹10 lakh is a solid retirement number. It sounds enormous at the time. They work toward it with discipline for two decades and they get there. And then they turn 60 and discover they actually needed ₹40 lakh. Four times the number. 

This isn’t one family’s story, it repeats across generations. People plan for what they hope is enough, but reality, driven by inflation and longer lives, usually demands about four times more.

Why this keeps happening

Four forces drive this gap and they have been consistent across every generation.

Force 1: Lifestyle creep is the one people underestimate most, not because costs go up but because the category itself transforms. In 1999, the average Indian household spent less than 3% of their budget on conveyance. By 2022-23, that share had grown to over 7.5%, more than doubling, and what sits inside that category today looks nothing like what it did then. It went from a bus pass and a two-wheeler to car EMIs, Uber, and annual flights. The line item did not inflate, it became an entirely different thing.

Force 2: Taxes are another silent drain that most retirement spreadsheets get wrong: LTCG on equity was zero not long ago, and today it sits at 12.5% above ₹1.25 lakh, with dividends taxed at slab rates. Every rupee of return is a smaller rupee in your hand than your model assumed.

Force 3: Then there’s longevity, which sounds like good news but functionally means your retirement corpus needs to fund 30 years of life, not 15. Life expectancy in India has moved from 60 to over 71 years in two decades, and with medical breakthroughs accelerating, planning to live till 90 is no longer pessimistic.

Force 4:  The returns that built your wealth will not sustain it. The Nifty 50’s own history tells this story clearly. As India’s economy has matured, the explosive returns of the liberalisation era have moderated decade by decade. When a country develops, GDP and earnings growth slow, and market returns become more stable. India’s 12–14% returns after 1991 came from rapid growth, but that phase is now cooling. After retirement, returns drop further because you take less risk, so your money grows more slowly than expected.

What Inflation is actually doing to your runway

Since 1972, the Government of India has conducted eleven household consumption surveys spanning 51 years of data, and the answer has been almost exactly the same every single time. A family of four that spent ₹215 a month in 1972 spends ₹20,512 a month today. That is a CAGR of 9.4%, based on what real families actually spent. 

If anything, it’s understated for affluent households, since average inflation for healthcare and education is lower than what upper-middle-class families actually experience.

Healthcare is a separate problem entirely. Medical costs in India have been rising at 12–15% annually, and surgery costs have increased by 300% over the last decade. Healthcare’s share of total household spending also rises predictably with age, from around 8.6% of income in your late fifties to over 13% after age 65, and continues to climb thereafter.

The person retiring today spending ₹30,000 a month on healthcare-related costs will be spending well over ₹1.5 lakh a month on the same needs in 2045. This is not a worst-case scenario. It is simply where the data points.

A 7-day ICU stay in a mid-range private hospital in a metro can cost ₹1–2 lakh, even before surgery or medicines. Health insurance premiums have also more than doubled in recent years, (from ₹12,000 a year in 2015 to ₹26,500 in 2023). 

But most retirement plans use a single inflation rate for everything. This is a mistake, healthcare and everyday expenses don’t rise at the same pace, and treating them the same can distort your plan.

So what number do you actually need?

Before we get to the numbers, a caveat worth pausing on.

The variables that go into a retirement corpus calculation are not universal. A professional spending ₹50,000 a month and an HNI spending ₹2 lakh a month are not running the same equation, even if both are 40 today, retiring at 60, and planning to live until 90.

Take lifestyle inflation. The ₹50,000 spender sees moderate creep over time, costs rise, but the basket stays relatively similar. The ₹2 lakh spender experiences something faster. Travel upgrades, private healthcare, premium schooling for grandchildren, club memberships, these categories inflate quicker than the average. So while we use 7% pre-retirement lifestyle inflation for the first profile, the second runs closer to 9%.

Your actual number depends on your age, spending, retirement timing, and the lifestyle you intend to protect. The only way to know it is to calculate it honestly using your real inputs,  not a round figure someone picked for a headline.

Use the Dezerv Retirement Calculator to figure out your retirement corpus. Every variable is adjustable and the math is shown transparently.

You’ve hit the corpus. Now the harder problem.

Here is where almost every retirement conversation stops. Hit the number, retire, done. But building the corpus and making it last 30 years are two fundamentally different problems, and almost all the attention, all the planning, all the anxiety, goes toward the first one. Almost nobody prepares for the second.

You spend 30 years filling a bucket. You then spend 30 years drinking from it carefully, knowing the bucket has a permanent hole called inflation that never closes regardless of whether you are earning, and knowing that the tap you are drinking from is not a guaranteed flow. 

Managing that dynamic across three very distinct decades, with very different spending profiles, is what withdrawal planning actually means, and most people only discover it matters after they have already retired.

In my experience, the people who get accumulation right but ignore withdrawal often end up in more trouble than the people who planned less but thought harder about how to draw. And the reason is simple: building is linear, but spending in retirement is not.

Retirement is living three different lives

The single most important thing to understand about withdrawal is that your spending does not stay flat across 30 years. It follows a curve, and each phase has its own financial character that requires its own thinking.

A common mistake is treating retirement as one fixed monthly number. But your needs change with age, what feels tight at 62 may be too little at 87. And the legacy you want to leave in your 80’s  needs to be ring-fenced in your 60’s, because the lifestyle of the active years, if left unchecked, is the single biggest threat to what you intend to pass on. Say you retire with ₹25 crore and want to leave ₹8 crore behind for a child’s business or a grandchild’s education. That ₹8 crore is no longer part of your spending corpus. You are retiring on ₹17 crore, not ₹25, and every part of your withdrawal plan needs to reflect that from day one.

How to actually draw from your corpus

Most people treat retirement like their working years, spend first, save what’s left. In retirement, that habit becomes costly. The goal is simple to state and genuinely difficult to live: draw enough to fund your life without interrupting the compounding that keeps your corpus alive. 

Think of your portfolio in retirement as a tree you are harvesting fruit from. The fruit is what you live on. The tree is what you protect. The moment you start cutting branches for firewood, the future harvest shrinks permanently.

The logic behind this structure is simple.  SWP funds your life, the buffer handles shocks, and equity fights long-term inflation. Each layer has one job, and the discipline is making sure nothing borrows from the wrong one.

The one rule worth internalising above everything else: if you can plan for it, it belongs in Layer 1. If you cannot plan for it, it belongs in Layer 2. Layer 3 is never the answer.

A Europe trip or renovation? Layer 1. A medical emergency? Layer 2. Selling equity after a market fall? That’s the mistake that cuts your retirement short.

In summary

₹40 crore is not a number I put out to alarm anyone. The real point is this: your target corpus number depends on your age, spending, goals, and timeline, and you need to calculate it honestly. Building wealth is one challenge. Making it last 30 years, through inflation, rising healthcare costs, and different life stages, is a different one that needs planning and discipline.

Most people focus only on building wealth and ignore making it last. That gap can hurt, but those who address it early are far better prepared.

Disclaimer – Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information contained in this document is for educational purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, terms and conditions. The data/target corpus mentioned herein are for illustrative purposes only and are based on standardized assumptions. Actual outcomes are subject to market risks and depend on multiple variables which may vary from person to person. This should not be construed as a guarantee of returns or personalized investment advice. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only.

But they showed up. 

And the session reminded me just how little most of us have actually thought about this. Fewer than 5% of Indians have a Will, the lowest among developing economies, in a country with nearly 200 million demat accounts. 

Most people who spend years building wealth think carefully about how to grow and protect it. What they rarely consider is what happens to it the moment they are no longer around, and that gap is where families can come apart. 

So this week I wanted to bring that conversation to a wider audience and break down everything we covered, because what came out of that session was genuinely useful, and too important to stay within a Saturday Zoom call.

In this edition, 

• The cost of not having a Will 
• How to draft it right: what to specify, what to avoid, and which assets need special attention
• What actually makes a Will legally valid in India, and where most people get it wrong
• The six reasons Wills get challenged after death, and how to prevent each one
• When to update you Will 

Let’s begin.

Why everyone needs a Will

The consequences of dying without a Will are not abstract. More than 70 percent of Indian families face property disputes after a death, and courts take between 3 to 10 years on average to resolve them. What makes this harder is that these disputes do not arrive when families are calm and prepared. They arrive in the middle of grief.

The most common version of this story involves a spouse. A husband dies, and his wife assumes the home they spent decades building together is hers, because in every practical sense it always was. What she discovers instead is that under the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, she is one heir among several, with rights equal to each of her adult children. Any one of them can legally demand their share. 

The law does not ask what her husband wanted, who cared for him, or who contributed to what he built. It applies a fixed formula where all Class I heirs, the spouse, sons, daughters, and mother, inherit simultaneously with equal priority. If any Class I heir exists, Class II heirs like siblings and father  receive nothing at all. 

Nobody in the family needs to be acting out of greed for this to become a serious problem. The law simply fills the space that a missing Will leaves behind, and it fills it with arithmetic rather than intention. 

Having a  Will changes all of this. It lets you decide who gets what, ensures your spouse is genuinely protected rather than just assumed to be, removes the ambiguity that turns grieving families into opposing parties, and gives you the ability to name a guardian for your children if something happens to both parents. With a Will, assets transfer quickly and cleanly. Without one, the courts take years, and the cost is rarely just financial.

There are reportedly over 4.5 crore pending cases in Indian courts, a large portion of which are inheritance and succession disputes that could have been avoided with a Will.

How to write a valid Will

The requirements are far simpler than most people believe, which is partly why so many delay for no good reason. No stamp paper, no notary, no lawyer’s office, no specific format, and no registration needed. A Will written on plain paper in any language is legally valid as long as a few rules are followed precisely. Those rules are worth understanding clearly, because getting even one of them wrong can void the entire document in court.

1. Requirements for a valid Will

2. The signing process

The execution is where most legal challenges occur. Follow this order strictly:

• Step 1: You sign the document while both witnesses are physically watching you.
• Step 2: Both witnesses sign the document while you are watching them.

Never have witnesses counter-sign later at their own homes. If they weren’t in the room when you signed, the Will is void.

3. The drafting details that you shouldn’t miss

4. Guardianship & Execution

5. On registration and storage

Registration is optional, but if you are excluding a natural heir, if your estate is high-value, or if disputes are likely, it is worth doing. It keeps the original safe, reduces forgery allegations, and provides strong evidence of sound mind at the time of signing.

Whether or not you register, hand an original copy to each beneficiary directly, give notarized copies to your banks, and make sure everyone who needs to know the Will exists actually does.

After the Will:  Keeping it protected & updated

A Will is not a one-time task. It is a living document that should be revisited whenever your life changes in a significant way. Marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a beneficiary, a major change in assets, a move abroad, or a change in who you have named as executor or trustee are all triggers to review the document. Note that in India, unlike in some other countries, marriage does not automatically revoke a Hindu’s Will. But it should still prompt a thorough review of every clause.

For minor updates, a codicil, which is a formal amendment executed with the same two-witness formality as the original, is sufficient. For structural changes, a fresh Will that explicitly revokes all previous Wills is cleaner and leaves less room for confusion in court. An unregistered later Will prevails over an earlier registered one, as long as it meets all the formal requirements.

One significant legal development from 2025 is worth knowing. The Repealing and Amending Act of 2025 removed Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act, which means probate is no longer mandatory for Hindus transferring assets under a Will, even in Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata where it was previously required by law. 

In most cases, a copy of the Will and a notarized death certificate are sufficient to begin the transfer process with a bank or housing society. Contested Wills may still require court intervention, but for straightforward situations the administrative burden on your family is now materially lighter than it was a year ago.

Why Wills get challenged, and how to prevent it

Most Will disputes are not surprises. The same handful of reasons come up again and again in court, and every single one of them has a straightforward fix if you know to look for it.

The most common allegation is undue influence, which usually means a beneficiary was too involved in preparing the Will and someone else ended up excluded. The fix is simple: keep beneficiaries and their spouses completely out of the drafting and signing process. The next most common is mental incapacity, which gets raised when the testator was elderly or unwell at the time of signing. A doctor’s certificate obtained on the actual signing date makes this argument very difficult to sustain in court.

Vague drafting invites multiple interpretations, so use precise descriptions throughout. When property descriptions are imprecise, anyone with a competing claim has room to argue about what was actually meant. Specific survey numbers, account categories, and registration details leave no room for interpretation. 

Witness irregularities follow the same logic: a witness who can be pressured, bribed, or discredited is a liability, so the integrity of the people you choose matters more than their availability. And forgery allegations, where someone produces an alternate Will after the testator’s death, are genuinely hard to disprove without registration. Registering the Will and distributing originals to multiple parties closes that door.

None of these risks are unavoidable. They are just things people do not think about until it is too late.

In conclusion

The best Will is one the whole family knows exists. A Will discovered months after a death, sitting in a locker no one knew about, creates exactly the ambiguity it was meant to prevent.

Starting this conversation with parents or a spouse does not have to be morbid. Frame it as an act of love, not a confrontation with mortality. Share a real example of what happens when a family has to navigate this without a Will. 

Pick a moment after a celebration rather than a charged one. Lead by example by sharing that you have made or are making your own Will. If the conversation feels too personal, suggest involving a professional together. And make it urgent rather than heavy. The point is not to dwell on death but to remove a source of future stress so everyone can move forward.

Disclaimer – The information provided in herein is for educational purposes only and is as on date of the document. This document does not constitute legal advice. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed 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. Succession planning involving Wills is a legal process; we recommend consulting with a qualified legal professional or a specialized estate planning advisor before taking any action.

Most people in the village didn’t think much of it. But Hamaguchi remembered a warning: when the sea pulls back like that, a huge wave can follow. He predicted that a tsunami was coming. 

There was no time to warn everyone. So Goryo did something drastic. He set fire to his own rice fields on the hill,  his entire harvest.  People saw the fire and ran up to help. As they reached the hill, the tsunami hit the village below and destroyed everything. But those who had climbed up survived. Hamaguchi wasn’t certain of Tsumani, but he saw the sign and acted on it immediately.

For most of human history, that’s what prediction was for – reducing risk, making better decisions, and surviving what was coming, in a world with no internet and very little information.  That instinct hasn’t changed. But what we do with it has.

Today, predictions have become a product. There are platforms where you can put real money on real-world outcomes,  elections, interest rates, sports, even something as absurd as whether the US will confirm the existence of aliens by 2027. These platforms operate like financial exchanges, and they have a name: prediction markets.

The pitch is simple: if you understand something better than others, you can make money. That appeal is genuine.  But that conviction can quickly become entertainment, entertainment becomes thrill, and thrill becomes something harder to walk away from.

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• Why India’s own prediction market got raided and shut down
• How these platforms actually works and the risk of outcomes being gamed 
• Who is really making money and who is losing it
• The insider trading problem that nobody wants to solve
• The psychology of people engaging with these platforms
• What the culture these platforms are building means for how you think about wealth

The same idea, different endings

The US has two dominant platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket. Both operate like financial exchanges, both allow you to bet real money on real world outcomes, and between them they executed $12 billion in trades across 2025.

Now India tried building its own version, but the government shut it down within years. Back in 2019, a Gurugram startup called Probo launched, allowing users to bet yes or no on cricket scores, election results, and budget decisions. It had over 20 million users at its peak, the appeal being obvious given a young population, rising smartphone penetration, and the human thrill of fast rewards. But the government saw it differently. The ED raided Probo in July 2025 and froze ₹284.5 crore in assets, concluding that the yes-or-no format was gambling dressed up in trading. Parliament passed the Online Gaming Bill 2025 shortly after, and Probo shut down, with ordinary users left with money stuck in accounts as legal proceedings dragged on.

What happened here is instructive: the line between investing and gambling is becoming harder to draw, and regulators around the world are drawing it in very different places.

How they actually work

A prediction market lists a question and every question has two outcomes: yes or no. 

Will the Fed cut rates before June? Will this team win the championship? Will this country go to war? You pick a side and put money behind it.  

What makes it more interesting than a simple bet is the pricing. Each outcome trades between 0 and 100, representing the probability the crowd assigns to it. If a contract is at 65, the market is saying there’s roughly a 65% chance it happens.

As new information comes in, people update their positions and the price moves. You don’t have to wait for the final outcome to make money. If you buy at 40 and it moves to 60, you can sell. Also platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket don’t bet against you. They match buyers and sellers and take a small fee. That’s what makes this feel more like a market than traditional betting. 

But one thing that matters more than it seems is how outcomes are settled.  

On Kalshi, results follow predefined rules and specific sources. On Polymarket, disputed bets are decided by voting. The votes are controlled by holders of a token called UMA,  the more tokens you hold, the more power you have.  

In March 2025, a $7 million bet on whether Ukraine would agree to a deal with Donald Trump jumped from 9% to 100% and settled as “Yes,” even though no official agreement happened. Some users claimed a large token holder influenced the vote. So if someone holds enough tokens, they can affect the outcome,  even if reality says otherwise.

What matters isn’t just what happens, but how the platform defines and verifies it. That’s a meaningful risk you should understand before treating these markets as truth machines.

From a university experiment to a billion dollar industry

Before any of this was a product, it was an academic question: can a crowd of people, betting real money, outpredict experts?

In the late 1980s, economists at the University of Iowa built a small platform called the Iowa Electronic Markets. People could trade on election outcomes using real money. The result was surprising, the market beat leading polls, not because participants were smarter, but because they were expressing genuine, financially-committed beliefs rather than stated opinions. When money is on the line, people stop performing confidence and start revealing what they actually think. 

Then In the early 2020s, two startups took this idea mainstream. Kalshi launched in the US with regulatory approval. Polymarket launched offshore and later paid a penalty for operating without approval. 

Since then, growth has been rapid. Kalshi went from about $100 million in weekly volume to over $3 billion, a 30x increase in one year.  Polymarket grew even faster, from $73M in trading volume in 2023 to ~$9B in 2024, roughly 120x in a single year.

Sports drive most of the activity, accounting for around 80% of volume. And here’s what caught my attention recently: over a single week in April 2026, the IPL generated $100M  in volume on Kalshi alone, more than the NHL and PGA Tour combined.

With matches airing in the US in the morning (a low betting window), demand filled the gap, showing people will bet on sports regardless of the timezone. Politics and macro events are catching up fast, from near zero to over $700 million in weekly volume in under six months. Sports bring people in, other categories keep them engaged.

The 2024 US presidential election changed the narrative entirely. Both platforms called a Trump win well before the television networks did. Polymarket did nearly $11B in trading volume. CNN, CNBC, and Fox News signed partnership deals with Kalshi, putting its odds on screen during live broadcasts as though they were established data rather than betting lines.  But one correct prediction doesn’t prove the model always works.

When the crowd gets It wrong

During the 2016 Brexit referendum, prediction markets were 80% confident that Britain would vote to stay in the EU. Britain voted to leave. The same year, markets gave Hillary Clinton up to a 91% odds of winning the US presidential election, and Trump won.

More recent data shows the same pattern. On Polymarket, about 1 in 3 markets were wrong. Accuracy was around 67%. Kalshi did slightly better at 78%. 

The misses carry a financial cost too. On Polymarket, about 84% of traders are in the red. Smaller traders do the worst, with typical losses around 27%. Only very large traders (moving more than $500,000) tend to make money, and even they earn modest returns.

And yet, these platforms keep growing. That’s because losing here feels different. It doesn’t feel like luck,  it feels like you were close, just slightly wrong. You can tell yourself you did the work and next time you’ll get it right.

That belief,  that your judgment is the key, is what keeps people coming back, and what makes these platforms hard to walk away from.

Who is actually making money?

When you open platforms like Kalshi or Polymarket, it feels like you’re trading against someone with a different opinion. But often, you’re not. You’re trading against hedge funds running algorithms with better data, speed, and tools. They’re not guessing, they’re systematically making money from people who are. And the platforms rely on them to keep markets running.

There are also hidden costs. Fees on winning trades and bid-ask spreads reduce returns. For casual users, making consistent profits becomes very hard. On Polymarket, more than 2/3rd of all money won goes to just 740 accounts, out of over 2 million users.

There’s also a risk of manipulation. Big bets can move prices, which influences how other participants  think and bet. When that happens, the “wisdom of crowds” starts to break down.

At the same time, something interesting is happening. Big institutions like Goldman Sachs and Wall Street are starting to watch these markets for signals,  like inflation or interest rate expectations, similar to how they track the VIX. A former Fed official even said that for forecasting interest rate moves, Kalshi is already the most reliable real-time signal they have.

So the same platform that is taking money from retail users is simultaneously becoming a serious forecasting tool for the world’s largest financial institutions. That gap, between who it is sold to and who actually benefits, is probably the most important thing to understand about this industry.

The insider trading problem

Here is the paradox at the heart of prediction markets. The very thing that makes them powerful, that people with private information are incentivised to express it through prices, is also what makes them dangerous.

There have been at least two documented cases of this playing out. A trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket by correctly predicting US and Israeli military strikes against Iran, winning 93% of their bets on operations that had not yet been announced publicly. In one case, someone placed $87,000 on a US strike and walked away with $515,000, with the bet placed 71 minutes before the bombs fell. 

There is a real difference between someone who reads widely, thinks carefully, and forms an independent view, and someone betting on a military strike with a classified briefing in hand. The first is informed judgment; the second is a national security problem that happens to pay very well. Whether any platform rule changes are actually enforceable on an anonymous, offshore, crypto-based exchange is a question nobody has cleanly answered yet.

The psychology of a generation betting on the future

A lot of the people drawn to these platforms are young, and there’s a reason why. Many in their 20s and 30s feel like the usual paths to wealth aren’t working anymore. Housing is too expensive, and salaries haven’t kept up with living costs. Awareness also reflects this. Around 17% of Gen Z and Millennials have heard of platforms like Polymarket, and 13% know Kalshi. Among older groups, that drops to about 4–5%. This is largely a young person’s product.

And many think it will grow. In one survey, 31% of people said betting on everyday events will become more important over time.

But look at what people are actually betting on. Things like whether Elon Musk will tweet a certain number of times in a week, or whether a specific politician uses a particular word in a speech.  At one point, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong even played along, casually mentioning specific words like “Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3”  during an earnings call because people had bet on them, affecting about $84,000 in wagers and then called it fun.

The broader cultural effect is subtler than individual gains and losses. When every unfolding event, an election, a military operation, a corporate announcement, is also a tradeable contract, it changes how people relate to those events. The incentive shifts from understanding what is happening and why, to correctly predicting what will happen and profiting from it.

What this means for how you read any market

The reason prediction markets are worth understanding has nothing to do with using them. It is because the mechanism behind them, crowds expressing private knowledge through money, is already present in every market you participate in. 

Every time a stock moves sharply on no visible news, someone knows something you don’t. Every time a currency shifts before a central bank announcement, a belief is being expressed through a price. Prediction markets just made this visible in a new way.

But the same behavioural forces that make them interesting can be harmful. The urge to act on every signal, to treat every move as a bet, can slowly turn an investor into a speculator.

The serious question isn’t whether prediction markets are good or bad. It’s whether the broader culture they represent, betting on everything,  financialising everything, treating uncertainty as entertainment — changes how you build wealth over time. 

In a world that is trying to turn everything into a bet, not playing is also a choice.

Disclaimer -The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. Neither Dezerv nor its affiliates endorse, promote, or encourage participation in any betting, gambling, or speculative gaming platforms. Gambling involves risk, and nothing in this material should be construed as an inducement or solicitation to participate in gambling, whether legal or illegal. Dezerv shall not be liable for any actions taken based on this content, or for any consequences arising from the use of, or reliance on, this material. 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.

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.