Today, we’re introducing Daulat, a new-age, tech-enabled wealth management platform helping Indians invest better.
The inspiration to begin this can be traced back to what I have already been doing informally for my friends and family over the last 3-4 years i.e. helping them invest in a disciplined manner.
How it all started
Like most Indians, I was pushed by my parents to invest in ‘safe’ investment products like FD, PPF etc. But also like most Indians, I grew up amongst the constant household chatter of ‘Bazaar girega ab’ (The stock market will fall now) and ‘IPO overvalued lag raha hain? ’ (This IPO seems overvalued).
Yet, I intuitively knew, that is not a good starting point if I wanted to build wealth over a long period.
To get started and keep things simple, I started with researching mutual funds/ETFS — because it was less time-consuming than picking individual stocks. Like everyone else, I did everything — asked my peers, went through a bazillion investment websites/forums, signed up for premium memberships etc.
But, something was amiss
Everyone and every website had its own recommendation. There were just too many of them to make any reasonable sense out of. E.g. there are over 2,000 mutual fund schemes, across 48 fund categories, offered by 45 Asset Management Companies.
And that old-school broker and distributor of my father ? Well, he was more focused on ‘selling’ me all these investment products than helping me understand what they meant in the first place.
I never felt confident enough to invest — because I did not know what combination of them was a right fit for me and whether if I could trust someone/something who was not completely invested in my success.
There must be a better way of doing it
I looked around for a solution but unfortunately couldn’t find any. The expereince provided provided good inspiration to take things in my own hand and learn more about the art and science of investments — risk profiling, asset allocation, fund selection, portfolio construction, etc. About the utility of expensive analytical tools and software used by the world’s most influential decision makers.
Stock market, please meet COVID
March 2020 was a pivotal and defining moment. All my friends and family who had investment and accumulated some corpus in the markets were terrified to see their portfolio value drop by -20-30% essentially overnight. I started getting frantic calls for advice.
But my experience working at some of the world’s biggest and best investment firms — which had shaped my investment journey until then — allowed me to approach this momemt with calm and comppsure. Events such as these often shine a light on the importance of following a disciplined investing approach.
Hindsight is 20/20 (pun intended 🙂 ), but people who displayed the psychological strength and stayed invested through that period then experienced one of the best-performing bull markets the world had ever seen.
Putting it all together
The idea for Daulat evolved almost serendipitously, along with my own journey of helping people around me invest within a well-defined investment framework.
I was struck by how many of my friends/family often invested based on what they read/heard and ended up with a random collection of investments with no clear and strategy
Daulat is built with a mission to fix that. It wants to help Indians invest better by providing relevant investment solutions in a simple and easy-to-understand manner. And at the same time, do it with the comfort and ease of digital transactions that we’ve all come to expect.
But we will not stop there. We will also constantly monitor your portfolio to see if it’s on track to meet your goals. Check in with you every so often to make sure we’re working with your most updated information. And if you have any existing investments that may need a review, we will also do that for you. Phew!
Come, join us
Providing equitable wealth-creation opportunities to over 1.3bn people is a hard job. But I imagine an India where everyone can have a fair shot at their life. Daulat will always be at the forefront of simplifying and providing access to opportunities that will help every Indian achieve financial well-being. If you’re as excited as I am to begin this journey, sign up to be one of our first clients.
#AbBharatKaregaInvest
