The years went by and the road ahead | January 2022

As we enter 2022, we wish you and your loved ones physical, mental and emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. Let us start by talking about our (Prospurts) journey to date.

Our journey 2015-2022

It was the spring of 2015, in a small shared office in Gurgaon, we started our wealth division initially known as ‘Walls Of India’ - early investors would remember joining hands with the ‘Walls Of India’ team. Culturally we wanted to play the professional innings of a cricket test player and were quite influenced by our current cricket coach Rahul Dravid and hence the name ‘Walls of India’. For the ones who don’t follow cricket, he was known as ‘The Wall’. Grit,?resilience?and courage were the words generally used to describe his test innings!

Though we have travelled quite a distance since then, we had never thought that we will be able to make such a difference. We believe the cornerstone of the setup was and till date is the culture of discipline, values of truth and transparency which is woven amongst our team.

The idea was to focus on the financial wellbeing of a specific segment – working professionals and new-age entrepreneurs who understand the value of good advice, appreciate transparency and do not believe too much in a “relationship-driven product sales” approach generally followed by the wealth management industry across the world.

We also felt that this is one client segment (working professionals and new-age entrepreneurs) which for a variety of reasons is not being served adequately by the wealth management industry. Despite having done well in their academic and professional lives, and securing senior positions in the corporate world, were grappling with financial chaos and avoidance.

In the course of our journey, most people we met from this segment were either poorly invested or under-invested with no clear strategy on how to build wealth to take care of their long-term financial goals such as retirement and kid’s education especially foreign.

Every bit of learning acquired about this segment – be it problems, gaps, goals, solutions etc. have enabled us to devise better ideas and niche solutions. With technology, knowledge, hyper-personalization and seamless execution being our main pillars, we continued solving the unsolved problem of serving the underserved segment of investors, thus adding a competitive advantage.

During the course, we felt that even though we are playing a test inning for ourselves as well as our clients, we need to add the agility and mentality of a T20 player. And hence without compromising on values and culture, the approach gradually changed which was more pragmatic and practical. By using terms like ‘prosperity, spurt, professional and experts’ an existing investor helped us coin ‘Prospurts – spurt in prosperity’.???

We are ecstatic to share that many of our investors who joined hands a few years back have either achieved financial freedom or are in the process of achieving it with better financial health.

At this moment, we constantly endeavour to help our investors improve their financial well-being. To the best of our ability, we also try helping our investors with intellectual wellbeing by sharing content (written, audio or video) which we feel is relevant w.r.t. their personal, professional or investing journey. We would like to keep moving ahead by gradually keeping one foot ahead of another to strengthen our offerings.

We thank all our clients for having faith in us when you have the option of going to bigger known names in the industry. We promise to try our level best to never disappoint you. We are open to regular suggestions and criticism as they will help us to constantly improve.

2022 - Future

The pandemic has pushed us to our limits, but we’ve used our resilience to push back and keep going. As we look forward to a new year that we know will continue to present challenges, one thing we can do to help ourselves is to take some time to store up our resilience reserves.

It is heartening to see that not just individuals but organizations have stepped up to the challenge, adapting their businesses both to protect their employees and to continue serving their customers and communities. In a survey done by Mckinsey, 80 per cent of the executives shared that they believe their organizations have responded effectively to the pandemic.

Now since we have become pro in dealing with tough life scenarios ?, let’s talk about the market’s risks and opportunities. The last two years have been unprecedented which educated us about our real risk profile. It is one thing to tick in the profiler “I am okay with a 30% decline in my investments” and experiencing it in real is another.

We have to look at the larger picture of the Indian markets, ever before Covid hit us, we were facing earning headwinds for the last 5 -7 years due to numerous macro factors. The year 2020 was just like a pullback toy car that is like “Bitter pills have blessed effects”.

Outlook

The K shaped recovery for the Indian economy is well manifested. Taking a cue from the outline, there are pockets of stretched valuations, fair valuation and undervaluation. Going forward, the stock/sector selection will be a key to driving alpha’ in the portfolio. We as wealth managers have an affinity towards fund managers who focus on value with growth rather than growth at any cost.

Against this backdrop, rising cases of new Covid variants and uneven Fed rate hikes are amongst the major risks for the domestic equity market in 2022.?With the aforementioned risks, equity markets may turn volatile in 2022 and can correct intermittently as well… but then both volatility as well as intermittent correction, is not a risk, they are an opportunity. Most of our investors who have been investing with us for a few years have learnt how to make friends with volatility and how to use intermittent corrections to their advantage. We know some of them who (and rightly so) keep praying for markets to correct every few months so that they could invest their incremental investments at lower market levels.

Since most analysts on the street are expecting the markets to be volatile this year, our contrarian mind points the finger to the other side too. Let’s hope we get a volatile phase so that one the froth in the form of ‘equities in the weaker hands’ go away and secondly it allows us to use it to our advantage.

When it comes to personal portfolios, we feel asset allocation is the most important tool available to us to help us tide over the tough phases.

Happy investing!