Radhika Gupta calculates her personal investment returns only once a year, and not because she’s indifferent. She runs one of India's largest asset management companies, tracks markets for a living, and manages crores of rupees on behalf of investors every single day.
"I look at my own portfolio only once a quarter, and calculate returns on my portfolio once at the end of the financial year," said the CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Fund.
For Gupta, this discipline is entirely intentional. She has built a personal portfolio designed to run largely on autopilot, anchored by systematic investments across 8 to 10 mutual funds. Her strategy also includes a carefully maintained cash buffer, a handful of startup bets, and a global allocation she has been building since 2011. All of this is driven by the philosophy that the less she tinkers, the better her investments perform.
As part of Mint's annual Guru Portfolio series, Gupta discusses how her portfolio is structured, what a partial exit from a jewellery startup revealed about her approach to unlisted investments, why she has never bought a second home, and how an annual ritual with her husband has done more for her wealth than any market call.
The SIP engine
The backbone of Gupta's portfolio is a large and growing systematic investment plan (SIP) book comprising 8 to 10 funds spanning equity, hybrid, multi-asset, and a gold and silver fund of funds. She resets these amounts every year. "The major value cost averaging comes from the large SIPs I do every month," she said. Lump sum investments happen, but they are footnotes to a systematic strategy.
During the correction in February, she deployed some of the cash she keeps parked in arbitrage funds into mid- and small-cap positions. She did the same when election results triggered a sharp fall last year. "I keep that 4-5% or 8% cash in the portfolio, and whenever there are corrections I do some lump sum investments. But honestly, they are a small part of the overall portfolio," she said.
Her effective equity exposure is about 67%, of which 40% is in equity-oriented funds and the rest in hybrid funds. Large caps make up about 30% of her equity holdings, with the balance in mid and small caps. "The large cap index today largely represents banking, IT and energy. The themes that are genuinely exciting over the next decade live in mid and small caps," she said.
She is also deliberate about not letting market volatility drive allocation decisions. "We live in extremely unpredictable times, and if you're going to be worried about interest rates today and crude tomorrow and AI destroying everything, or whatever the news is every week, and try to make personal allocation decisions on that, it is very hard," she said. “So I consciously try to switch off the news.”
The 12x startup investment
Outside mutual funds, Gupta maintains an allocation of up to 15% in unlisted startups, mostly companies she has backed through Shark Tank India. She gives them a minimum of four to five years. "We give normal equity funds five years, so you have to give these startups at least five years, too," she said. In at least one case, conviction in the entrepreneur led her to add to a position after the initial investment.
This financial year, she partially exited from Palmonas, a jewellery brand she had invested in at a roughly ₹120 crore valuation. The partial exit came in at a valuation close to ₹1,500 crore. "It's only a partial exit because I'm super excited about the business," she said.
The 7-8% she keeps in arbitrage funds at all times is partly what makes this strategy possible. "If I see an interesting startup, I always have this capital. I think it's useful, especially when you're investing in unlisted companies, to have some amount of capital on hand," she said.
Real estate and gold
Gupta owns a home and has no intention of buying another as an investment. "Real estate in Mumbai is expensive and location-specific. I don't consider myself an expert in real estate, and I generally prefer investments that are liquid, except the small exposure to startups," she said. "Also, people often don't understand and calculate the transaction cost, post-tax returns, cost of maintenance, etc. I just prefer to do liquid investments and my multi-asset investments have exposure in real estate through Reits and Invits."
Her fixed-income investments follow similar logic. Rather than buying debt funds outright, she gets most of her debt exposure through balanced advantage and multi-asset funds for tax efficiency. The rest sits in arbitrage. “I have exposure to debt because it's an important risk control and diversifier. What's important for me is to take tax efficient exposure to debt.”
She also has SIPs into a gold and silver fund of funds and holds additional exposure via multi-asset funds. Importantly, she hasn’t tried to time any of these investments. "I think people do a terrible job timing most things," she said. "When we launched our gold and silver fund four years ago, we struggled to collect ₹15 crore. Then in January this year, we got ₹500 crore in the same fund. Timing is very difficult with these things."
Year-end ritual
The single habit Gupta credits most for improving her financial outcomes is not a market call or an asset allocation insight, rather an year-end personal finance review. Every year, she and her husband sit down to review the previous year's spending, calculate their personal rate of inflation, map their investments against goals, and reset their SIP amounts. "We look at our increments and bonuses, and reset our investments and SIPs at the end of the year," she said.
This discipline ensures that income growth goes into investments and isn’t completely absorbed into household expenses. "Your income rises, you get appraisals and increments, but the amount you are saving doesn't actually rise unless you consciously make it rise," she said. "I have these targets that I want my SIP book to get to a certain size, and I look at that every year.”
Asked whether this year’s financial review caused her to change her son’s global education corpus due to the rupee’s sharp depreciation, Gupta said it is still pegged at ₹10 crore.
"I’ve considered roughly 3-4% annual rupee depreciation in that calculation. Currency movement is uneven year to year. That ₹10 crore goal is still 15-16 years away," she said. Her son is only three years old, but she’s already about 30% of the way there.
Gupta has a separate investment portfolio in her son’s name and the foreign education goal is what shapes it, with close to 30% in international funds, almost entirely US-focused. This is separate from her own exposure to global equity, which is about 17% of her equity portfolio. “I would like to take my own global equity allocation to 20%, but Sebi’s limits on international fund investments have made that difficult,” she said.
Gupta has been investing globally since 2011, before international funds were common in India. She has exposure to the US, Taiwan and Korea through an emerging market fund, and China.