MT29 | How To make Daulat In Times Of Economic Uncertainty

Are your CAs charging a hefty amount for advice on investments? Meet Varun Fatehpuria, Founder of Daulat, a wealth management app designed for Indians. Varun talks about how GenZ is impulsive when it comes to investing and ignores the two Ds of investment – Disciplined approach and Diversification. He also breaks some myths about Real Estate investments and Bitcoin. Tune in to the episode to reach your investment goals.

Discussion Topics: How To make Daulat In Times Of Economic Uncertainty

• Who is Varun Fatehpuria?
• How does Daulat help in uncertain economy?
• Covid induced economic volatility
• Panic calls from relatives during economic volatility
• Psychology of investing
• The 2 Ds – Diversification and Disciplined approach
• Investing 101
• Risk in Investments
• Who is a pseudo investor?
• How to invest in Real estate in an economical way
• Is Bitcoin gold?

Transcript: How To make Daulat In Times Of Economic Uncertainty

Amit: Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of MoneyTok, where we help make personal finance and investing simple and accessible through both my own personal experience. I’ve been doing this for about 20 years now, and through the expertise of my guests, and today we have one such expert guest, which is Varun Fatehpuria, who’s the founder of Daulat. And Daulat is a wealth management platform. So he’s going to be talking to us a little bit about how an individual investor can construct a diversified portfolio, which is also customized to their needs. But first, before we begin, May, I request you to quickly follow the show, so that you don’t miss any of the great content that we have coming up. And if you do like this episode, and I’m sure that you will, please do rate us five stars, it helps us a lot. So thanks a lot for that. So Varun, thank you so much for being with us here today. Before we start, maybe you could introduce yourself, you know, your background in money management and investing. And also tell us more about Daulat. It sounds very interesting. By the way, for those of you who are not based in India, Daulat actually means money or wealth. So that’s why it’s a very appropriate name for a wealth management service.

Varun Fatehpuria: Right. Thank you so much for having me. On the show, right, I was really looking forward to this one. So just as a quick introduction, I’m actually a finance professional by training. I went to Hong Kong and Italy for my undergraduate studies, and pursued a degree in finance and information systems, quite honestly, I think, prior after subsequent to my studies, I actually also spent a year working with Blackstone, which is the world’s largest alternative asset management firm in the real estate private equity team. And prior to that, I also had some experience working with Bloomberg in the equity research department. So really, I think that was the starting point for me in terms of, you know, finance and money management in general, right? I mean, both of these experiences individually, and cumulatively, not just allowed me to be in a global financial center, like Hong Kong, but also really just get a front row view and see it in terms of how these big institutions actually thought about investing. Really, what sort of tools and software do they use, what sort of people that they hire, so that really helped actually, in setting the tone in terms of how I actually want to approach investing, and stuff. So that really helped me actually, you know, get into this whole money management thing?

Amit: Yeah. And in fact, you worked in, I would say, the big name companies in this particular space. So that’s when I’m sure that was formative to, you know, to Daulat than what you actually decided to now to. So tell us more about the Daulat itself? What are you trying to do? What’s the purpose really, of the company?

Varun Fatehpuria: Yeah, I think Daulat, you know, just, I mean, just going over years to just quite honestly, it’s very simple just to help Indians invest better, right? I mean, we try to put this whole investing thing into a lot more perspective and structure, which honestly, I think if you asked me got a bit lost in the last 18 to 24 months, due to this, I would say whatever COVID induced bull market, right? I mean, obviously, it ended up being this double edged sword, which actually helped a lot of people come into the markets experience, you know, what investing is, and stuff, but also created this wrong set of notion and expectations in the mind, right. And pretty much they saw a market, which is traveled in only one direction up into the right. So they basically had this notion that you could pretty much you know, just lay down on the couch, hit a few buttons here. And that and pretty much that’s it, I mean, investing is done, right. But I think people who have spent time studying investing spent time in the markets would actually appreciate investing is just more than that. I mean, it’s a whole discipline in and by itself, it actually requires a lot of study and research. So we try to basically actually provide that customized solutions to our investors, where we actually just take care of the heavy lifting, heavy lifting of investing. So thinking about risk tolerance, thinking about asset allocation, thinking about how actually portfolios needs to be constructed, do the portfolios need to, you know, change over time, so they that they are in sync with the market, stuff like that. And we just, you know, present a customized all in one solutions to the investor so they don’t have to think about all of those things. And also, I think what we had seen roughly right, I mean, obviously, the first 18 months, pretty much everyone was doing fine, but in the last six months, the kind of downturn that we’re actually seeing in the markets I think at that point in time, people started realizing, you know, maybe, Hey, maybe I need someone like an expert or someone who does this full time to help me out with how do you actually go through situations like this? So that’s really good for us.

How did you get into the space?

Amit: Yeah, I think you’ve, you’ve hit upon a couple of important points here. I think in the last 18 months, or 24 months, like you said, the world has been a very strange place. And, in fact, while a lot of people may have been enticed into the market, they would have been enticed at the time when it began to boom, and so therefore, they probably facing the brunt of that now that things have started to tank. But it was also a very good time for a patient investor to have gotten. So for example, in March, April, 2020, even you know, everything really crashed, was an excellent time to get into buying stocks. Because, you know, you, you would have taken the benefit of the entire Upswing after that. And it’s an interesting thing about markets, which is, so so I’ve been investing for a while, I would say often on I’m not, I’m not a very heavily, you know, focused investor in the sense I like to buy and hold. And then the thing is that because I’m a buy and hold kind of person, I don’t have a very good entry plan, I don’t have a very good exit plan. And so therefore, you know, the market went up, and then it went down, and I went up and down along with it, I’m still, I think, come out overall positive, actually fairly decently positive. But it is a fact that, you know, for most people, you don’t have the time or frankly, even the inclination to sit around managing this all the time and trying to figure out what’s the macro economics, and then what’s your stock and all of that. So service, like, Daulat, I’m sure actually helps a lot of people who are savvy, but not, you know, don’t have that much time or energy to put into this. So tell me a bit more about how, how you came about this, because you’re obviously working in great companies, you would have made a fair amount of health yourself if you had continued working there. So why do all of this,

Varun Fatehpuria: Think how I actually got into the politics, so I’ve been personally investing my own wealth, whatever lever that I had with my first check for the first four to five years, right? I mean, I fairly did, okay, given my experience. And at that point in time, that sort of like, also slowly graduated from managing my own money to managing my friends and family’s corpus, so on and so forth. I’ve been doing this for about four or five years right now, I mean, didn’t really have so to speak a grand plan to get into this space, I mean, started getting a lot of these calls from my friends and family asking, you know, Hey, what should I be doing at this point in time? My portfolios Correct? Is this a good time to actually double down so on and so forth? So I think that that’s when you actually start realizing that obviously, I think the I buy apps and stuff have made the entire transactional part really easy. But it’s, when you’re managing something as personal as one’s worth, right? I mean, you need at that point in time, some level of human intervention to manage that. So that’s really I would say, where the whole idea for Daulat Tree started to germinate. I mean, at that point in time, I was still going and speaking to investors, seeing how I could just, you know, potentially help them. And what we ended up seeing is this basically whole ad hoc portfolios that had been created with no sort of an agenda, no sort of a perspective structure put in place. So maybe, as I went and spoke to a lot of people, I think, at that point in time, where I started to realize that maybe, you know, this is something that could be taken, taken up upon.

Amit: Right, you mentioned that, during this whole, whatever the ups and downs of the market recently, is when people started reaching out to you. I’m sure there were some panic calls, as well.

Varun Fatehpuria: Absolutely. I mean, when you see a portfolio, I mean, during a course of a week, you’ll see pretty much a portfolio drop over 20%. And that means pretty much hard earned money for you that you’ve saved for five years, 10 years. I mean, so no amount of literature can basically just tell you that, yeah, I’d be fine with that. Obviously, it’s chittery. You sort of like to see overnight, your portfolio value just crashing with the amount of velocity that it did. Right. So yeah, that’s basically then gets a bit touchy.

The psychology of money and investing

Amit: Yeah, and I think it’s underrated the amount to which psychology plays a role in investing. I mean, of course, there’s now a very popular book, The Psychology of money, but it’s, it’s only when you do it, and then you go through it. I mean, go through the downs, go through a downturn, not upwards, everybody’s happy. But only when you go through a downturn. Do you truly know what you’re like as an investor and I think People don’t appreciate that until they actually go through a downturn. And the challenge is that over the last 10 years, pretty much, there has not been a sort of definitely a prolonged downturn, there have been corrections, but there has not been a major drop, like, let’s say, 2008 or 2000, or something like that. Also, I think people don’t quite get it without having gone through it.

Varun Fatehpuria: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of investing actually also has to do with the temperament, right? I mean, if, if you have the right temperament to actually see through that entire market cycle, so to speak, I mean, you’re there and the ups and the downs, are you able to sort of like withstand that volatility? And I think a lot of it also, I think, at least specially people in the younger generation, right, because a lot of the apps are made it really easy to just go and pick stocks, right? I mean, there is this itch, to somehow make it believe that you could do better than someone who’s doing this for a living. So you just go on an app, you see, okay, I’m just gonna go and buy this large cap stock, this mid cap stock, this multi bagger, this whole thing, so on and so forth. And I think that’s, that’s where a lot of the problems actually also stems from this desire to constantly keep busy with investing this desire to constantly think that you’re probably adding value to what you’re doing, which perhaps you would not be. So that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, I think, where I would say you need people to actually come and calm you down, and just obviously, also stems from the trust that you want to have in people that’s doing this.

Amit: Yeah, it’s, it’s effectively FOMO. The only news that you’re going to see when markets are going up is news is good news. Yeah, but he’s not telling you about the losses they’ve made in an upward trending market, they’re only going to talk about their wins, then you feel like everybody around you is winning. So therefore, you should also get in. And similarly on the other way, on the other way, as well, when things are going down, the only news you’ll hear is doom and gloom, and everything’s going to hell, which, and neither is is the ever really true. So. So I think all of this points to maybe, I think what you’re trying to say here is that if you adopt an ad hoc approach to doing things, and you’re everything is DIY, and everything is simplified, you’re probably making sort of a patchwork of things versus something that has some sort of structure and logic to it. So and I know, that’s really the core of what we’re going to talk about today. So So what is, what is it that enables this? I mean, you know, people talk about maybe sort of a disciplined approach, maybe Is that what you’re talking about?

How do you construct a portfolio?

Varun Fatehpuria: Yeah, I mean, minute talk about, let’s say, again, a lot of like, disciplined approach that I’m talking about, right? I mean, essentially, when you just go and really speak to people, right? I mean, these could be even first time investors who again, got into the markets for the last few years, or even more seasoned investors who have been investing through an old school broker or a distributor for the last 1015 years. I think, even though the psychology of both investors continue to be very different. The underlying sort of like, the problem remains the same where again, there’s an ad hoc portfolio approach. So let me start with just give you an example. Right, people have this sort of like notion of diversification, right? So now, I think intuitively, they would think that if they invested across 10 funds that diversified, I mean, essentially, if all of those 10 funds ended up holding the same stock, or at least, let’s say, even 60 to 70% of it, I mean, you’re not diversified when you could go and invest in five large cap funds for small cap funds in the name of diversification. But you need to put that into a lot more structure, you need to think about, okay, what sort of an asset classes exposure that you have? How much of an exposure do you have to that? Is that in sync with what’s happening currently? And then that sort of like forms the basis of, actually how do you construct portfolios? I mean, you’ll be surprised to know, I mean, I sort of like feel a bit sad saying this, but there are countless number of people who are investing 20 3040 funds in the name of diversification. And it’s not that they have been sort of like they’re doing it by purpose, it’s just that they have been fed with so much of information, just by the virtue of reading it on the net, or being taken that 70 A call from their banks RM telling that so go and please buy this, this is going to give you X percent of return in the next two years. So you just keep on doing that. And over a period of time, they sort of like left with this hot potato, that essentially is not even beating the benchmark.

Amit: Yeah. In fact, one other driver of all of this is tax savings. So at the time, when you got to file your taxes, you suddenly do this last minute mutual fund investment because you’re trying to maximize your savings over there. And that’s also going to be some very random thing, which you did two days before the filing deadline, and that tends to also I think, proliferate this problem. So let’s talk a bit more about portfolio construction itself. Right? So how so maybe just walk me through step by step perhaps like, if I were now if let’s say I had a hammer, let’s say I’m an early career sort of persons who have 10 lakh rupees, investable or maybe 20 lakh rupees investable. What. And again for those who are not in India 10 lakhs is about 20,000. Well, about 15,000 US dollars, and 20 lakhs will be worth 30,000 US dollars. So, let’s say I have that kind of a corpus, how am I? How should I be thinking about portfolio?

Varun Fatehpuria: Yeah, sure. Um, it. So I think a couple of things, obviously, I think helps in setting the tone and the expectation and really keeping a portfolio in a more solid footing. Right. Obviously, I think when you’re looking at investing, you need to ask a couple of questions to yourself. Number one was really the time for us. And I think that really sort of forms the bedrock. When we’re thinking about how do we actually go about constructing portfolios, a lot of the answers will stem from what really is the time horizon? How long can you really stay invested in the markets? Because let’s be honest, this is not a gambling approach, where pretty much overnight, you can have your money doubled, or at least do that consistently over a period of time. So you need to understand what sort of time horizon Do you have? And number two, are you really saving towards the goal, whether that could be a down payment for your house, whether that could be saving up for a child’s education, or just generally, even if you don’t really have a goal, per se? I think it’s just good that even if you’re investing for gender, you have those questions in your mind. So once we have that in place, obviously, then sort of like comes to question of okay, how much risk can you actually take? And I think pretty much in a bull market, I think when you go and talk about risk, you end up looking silly. I mean, people do not want to talk about risk, they do not understand the risk. And they they’re like, I don’t want to have to do anything with risk, right? I mean, just give me something which gives me the best returns, fine, you can have that. But what happens in a situation again, like March or April of 2020, or just really what we’re seeing in the last six to eight months, do you have the temperament? Do you have sort of like that mindset to actually withstand that. And maybe a risk questionnaire could be a good shorthand for that. But if you’ve had the opportunity to actually live through moments where we have actually experienced that down third, do ask yourself those questions that maybe am I actually set up to handle this much portfolio drop? So once we have these couple of questions in place, right, I think that sort of like helps in then deciding what sort of an asset allocation you have. I mean, that really also is, I would say, one on one of investing, right. And asset allocation, simply I think, for the audience is just that how much of your money needs to be invested into different asset classes, whether that could be equities, whether that could be debt, whether that could be gold, or even Within equities, that could be domestic equities, international equities, I think it’s really important to actually put that into structure and actually align it with what your risk tolerance is. So let’s say if you are or can’t tolerate a high amount of risk in the market, probably you’d be having a higher exposure to equities, just by the virtue of the nature of the asset classes, which tends to go up and down over a period of time. So just

What is risk? What is volatility?

Amit: One, one quick interjection. So, you know, when we talk about risk, I think the word risk to a normal person has sort of slightly different connotations. Maybe not. Yeah, exactly. Whereas I think what we mean, here is more volatility. So how much of up and down? Can you take? So this means, so it’s not like something is inherently risky? Something which is high risk, doesn’t mean it’s a risky thing in normal English the way we would think of it, it just means that yes, you can, it’s gonna go up and down wildly. And so therefore, you could make a lot of money, you could lose a lot of money, I think,

Varun Fatehpuria: Yeah, inherently risk is not bad per se, as long as just that your ability to actually withstand that. Rollercoaster. Right. So maybe, let’s say if you have want to invest for a longer period of time, obviously, I think sort of like that risk level actually smoothens out so you just that you need to give that asset class that amount of time, so that you’re able to get the kind of returns that you’re expecting from the risk, or whatever that movements that you’re actually undertaking so that that’s basically what we actually mean by risk.

Amit: Yeah, also, the point of time as a is a good one things can be highly volatile in the short term, but directionally, you know, up into the right in the longer term, unless you get extremely unlucky and you bought at such a weird point of, you know, history where it’s gonna take, like decades to recover to whatever level it was at. But generally speaking, I think you When equity stocks and all that even if things look like doom and gloom right now, in the long run stocks have performed fairly well. And so in most points of time, if you entered and you had a long term horizon, you’d make better money than you might make with perhaps other forms of investment. Yeah,

Varun Fatehpuria: I mean, if history is any example, right, even if you go back last whatever, three, four or five decades and start to look at the trajectory of how a typical stock market index, whether that’s an India or the US or the euro has performed, right, it’s pretty much sort of like directionally has gone up. It’s just that I think as soon as you start zooming into those micro periods of three months, six months, 12 months, maybe at that point in time, you could see those up and down. But let’s say let’s be honest, if you’re not sort of like doing this for a living, you’re not an active trader, you sort of like do not want to make money on a day to day basis, pretty much sort of like, you know, go to just adopt a disciplined approach and let sort of like time take care of itself.

How should a beginning investor construct their portfolio?

Amit: Right? Okay. So let’s, let’s look at this hypothetical person, who is, you know, has this 10 lakh 20 lakh rupees to invest? How should, how should they construct their life, then there’s a beginning investor, right. So, how would you think they should construct their portfolio?

Varun Fatehpuria: Again, I think, again, alluding to the points that I made earlier, right, I think, once you have an understanding of, let’s say, how much of a risk can you tolerate, what sort of time horizon that you have, once we have those basic questions answered, we then get to the point where we start thinking about how much of your money should be allocated to different asset classes. So let’s say just for sort of argument’s sake, you want to invest for a long period of time, you’re fairly early into your professional career, you don’t really have a lot of dependents on and so forth. So squarely you would fit into the aggressive category, where obviously, there’s a much higher exposure to equities and riskier assets, as opposed to more stable and safer assets like debt, or bold, even for that matter. So let’s say we invest about 80 to 85% of your wealth in equities, right. And even in equities, there are multiple sub asset classes. So you could be invested into a large cap, or a mid cap, or a small cap stock, or you could be invested into international equities in the US or the Europe. And even within that, that different styles of investing. So again, don’t want to make it sound like too technical. But it’s just good to have an understanding that even within each of the asset classes, you need to have an understanding of what sort of an exposure do you have to each sub of that. So let’s say once we have that sort of like formed, right, about 75 to 80%, of wealth is going towards equities. And then we come down a bit deeper. And then we think about debt, right? I mean, people typically think about datas. Investing again, they probably invested in test in some form, or the other maybe in the form of fixed deposit or recurring deposits. It’s just that those are also debt instruments, but they just tend to be extremely tax inefficient from a tax point of view. So once we have that also formed, right, how much of your money needs to be invested into debt. So maybe that’s, let’s say, like 10%. And that’s also invested across corporate bonds and sovereign bonds, and public sector undertaking bonds. And then the final piece could be, let’s say, in gold, I mean, obviously, maybe you could have physical gold, but I think the purpose of including actual gold into the portfolio is just as a hedge. So let’s, if we rewind about six months back in time, right, let’s say January, February of this year, when sort of like we’ve seen the geopolitical uncertainty due to the war, the rise in the oil prices, at that point in time, when a lot of people investors actually started exiting equities, you could see the demand for gold actually started, right, if you would have invested in gold at that point in time, obviously, would have delivered a positive return. But just try to understand that gold is not there to sort of give you that return. It’s just from more of a hedge and a diversification point of view that you need to have these things in your portfolio. But let’s try and put these things into structure. Let’s try to think about how much risk can you take what sort of an asset allocation you have, and then build towards constructing a portfolio that would rather than just taking an ad hoc approach, and go into a money controller or something like that, and just buying based on whatever you have read or heard.

How do you view real estate as an asset class?

Amit: Right? Actually, one other question over here we’re on so for a lot of people, you know, they buy property, at least one, you know, their whatever the home that they want to live in. Now, that doesn’t fall into the typical wealth management portfolio of construct. But how do you view that, you know, in terms of comparing with equity, debt, gold, or like in which part of their portfolio should people think of real estate? Yeah,

Varun Fatehpuria: I mean, so again, real estate as an asset class, again, I mean, whether you’re holding actual physical real estate, right, and I think a lot of the people who would tend to be a bit more older tend to value the importance of seeing something tangible in value. But what they typically tend to forget that real estate as an asset class tends to be extremely illiquid. It’s just that when you actually need the money, you’d probably need another six to 12 months of time to be able to get rid of that. Right. So I think people in the younger generation sort of like do nots ascribe as much value to real estate as it’s a people, a generation about them would have, right. So in the US, and Europe as well, then there’s another sort of like you can get exposure to real estate through what is known as real estate investment trusts. REITs. Right. Essentially, I think REITs are similar to mutual funds, and that in mutual funds, you get exposure to equity, or the stock of the company. And in REITs, you get basically exposure to real estate as an asset class. So if you do want to have real estate as part of your portfolio, unfortunately, it’s a good portfolio diversifier. It’s always a good idea to, let’s say, consider having REIT in your portfolio. So that can sort of like you know, give you exposure to the real estate asset classes without going through that entire process of actually going and buying the property, making sure that it’s in line being illiquid, so on and so forth. So those actually, the REITs as an asset class actually strips out and takes away all the hassle of actually owning a physical property.

Amit: Right. Okay. Okay, thanks for sharing that. The other question I have is, in relation to Bitcoin, specifically, because a lot of people call Bitcoin digital gold because it’s limited in quantity. more limited, in fact, than gold probably is. So any views on that? Is it really digital gold? Or can you use that instead of gold?

Varun Fatehpuria: I think obviously, I think people who sort of like come after me for saying the words, it’s been sort of like the cool thing to do, right? I mean, the for the last four to five years, if you have a conversation with your friends or family, obviously, people would ask you, Hey, are you invested into Bitcoin? And sort of like, if you do not say yes to that answer, probably people will raise an eyebrow as to what is this guy trying to do? Right? Obviously, I think people have gotten into bitcoin in the last four to five years, primarily because of it being a very speculative asset. And obviously, most of the people who had invested in 2016 70, pretty much got on multi fold returns in excess of whatever, like 50 times 100 times what they invested in, right. But for us, as well, and for me, personally, I sort of like do not guarantee I’m unable to see a lot of value in terms of, we want to understand what the actual underlying economic thesis of Bitcoin is where it is actually deriving value from and isn’t just a case of, you know, unlimited demand and finite supply. I mean, if that’s the case, obviously, then you will have something or have an asset which goes up, but is there a fundamental underlying economic reason to the way it is actually performing? So So that’s I mean, if you want to have exposure to Bitcoin as an asset class as, at best, we would, sort of like, you know, recommend to have one to 3% of portfolio again, if you can sort of, like withstand that. But I think regulations are still not very clear, because we’ve seen sort of like this clamp down, which is happening all across Asia, and the kind of fall that we have seen in a lot of these crypto and Bitcoin in the last eight months again, right. So people are still trying to wrap their head around it. Maybe I think it’s probably over time that we’ll be able to find an answer to that.

The fundamentals of portfolio management

Amit: Right. Okay. I think that’s a fair point. And it’s not behaving like a gold. At this point. It’s behaving more like, like you said, a speculative traded commodity, I guess, just like any other thing that you might be trading. Okay. So thanks a lot. We’re on this was, this was really cool. I also like how you laid out the basics of portfolio management very simply, I think people think maybe the most people overthink this. And so therefore, either they’re not doing it at all, like you said, like, you know, just spray and pray. Or they might think, oh my god, I have to do so much of math to figure out what all of this is about. But I think what you’re saying is at the end of the day, you have to understand how will you react in the event of things going down? How you will react when it goes up? Is things same for everyone? And given that kind of reaction? What sort of blend of things should you should you invest in, so that you it will not it will go down only to the levers which you can tolerate. And that being the case, you know, you you you wait more towards highly volatile things if you’re okay with that or you wait more towards less volatile things if you’re not okay with so much fluctuation, and that’s essentially the blend that you have to do. And that’s what the knowledge will help you with essentially and subsequent to that, I suppose portfolios have to keep being updated because markets move and you know, the way it is with my change? Is that something also that that you would do?

Varun Fatehpuria: Yeah, so obviously, I think portfolio itself do not remain static, right? I mean, you probably pretty much what you have on day one, day one would not sort of look the same at the end of five years, or 10 years down the line. And obviously, portfolios need to sort of like be in sync with what’s happening in the markets. But what I would caveat, that by saying is that you don’t get into the mindset of being fairly active that on a day to day or a month to month basis, we have that edge of doing something, obviously led that asset or that that portfolio sort of like, be invested for a certain period of time. And if you do sort of, like, you know, see, or at least have a point of view as to where the economy is headed. What sort of things are you seeing going on in the world at that point in time, you could sort of like, take a point of view, but again, do not sort of like, add this urge of constantly being on top of the things all of the time, and obviously, it’s not as complicated as maybe I’ve made it sound, but I think it’s just that just, if you’re going about your day to day job, I think you’re probably better off putting your energies into maximizing what you do over there, rather than thinking that investing is something as a part time, and I can just do it casually and be done with it.

Amit: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, essentially, if you keep fiddling, then it defeats the purpose of having a portfolio or just changing it all the time. Right. Okay, so thanks. Thanks so much for this was a really nice and enlightening conversation. I had a great time chatting with you today. And I’m sure our listeners benefited a lot as well. So thanks a lot for being here. And for those who are listening to us today, thank you also for joining us. Please do remember to follow the show and to rate this episode five stars. Do check out Daulat if you’re in the market to you know, figure out your own wealth management journey, perhaps you might be able to use the help. So thanks for joining me, Varun and mammoth with MoneyTok. See you next time. Thank you

Our Guest: Varun Fatehpuria

Our guest, Varun Fatehpuria, is a founder of Daulat which is a tech enabled wealth management company. Prior to starting this, he spent 3 years co-leading a real-estate development firm overseeing the launch of its affordable housing project in Kolkata. Previously, he worked with Blackstone — the world’s largest alternative asset manager with over $915bn in AUM — in their real-estate private equity team in Hong Kong.

His professional career was also interspersed with stints in Jones Lang LaSalle and Bloomberg LP in their Hong Kong offices. 

Varun graduated with distinction in Finance and Information Systems from the HKUST Business School at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a NiSM-certified (Series X-A and X-B) Investment Adviser.