These are some excellent DIY options for investing your excess savings, but do note that here you manage your brokerage account.
Many capable investors can’t be bothered with going “formal” with a PMS product for others. The route entails a lot of regulatory work and costs, and is justifiable only at a certain critical level of scale. But, they are extremely well read, articulate, and do have fantastic ideas.
From a fee perspective they are much cheaper than PMS offerings, and interests are also fully aligned, but they do need you to have the mental makeup to actually executing the trades & mirroring the model portfolios on your own. This is clearly not for everyone; if you don’t have this familiarity, you’re better off sticking to good mutual funds or a PMS where all of this capital management is done for you by professionals.
I should distinguish here between a full-fledged portfolio-advisory service (ex: Chauhan) & a stock-advisory service. There is a world of difference between the two. There are innumerable stock-advisory services & they should be avoided as far as possible. A stock-advisory service simply says “this is a good company/stock, go buy it”. They qualify their degree of confidence in the recommendation by saying – this is a 5% position, or a 3% position etc. Once you subscribe, you must go through the list of previously recommended stocks & see for which ones there is still a Buy recommendation, then execute the order per the position weight (3% etc). In such a stock-advisory service, there is typically not much thought given to what kind of cumulative risks may be built up from the stock recommendations. Portfolio construction – the art & science of how to allocate capital to a certain number of businesses, is a complex subject, and not putting a lot of thought into this has its consequences. More on this here. A full-fledged portfolio-advisory will take into account these considerations,.
Some of the best Portfolio Advisory services
Rohit Chauhan – runs one of the most widely read blogs on Value Investing in India.
You can find a lot on his excellent blog. Here’s an interview of his at SafalNiveshak which serves as a good starting point. There’s another in-depth interview at Gurufocus as well. Here’s his site : RC Capital Management.
Rohit has averaged ~22.5% CAGR since 2011 (as of Jul’23), with extremely low turnover (long holding periods), and a high share of high quality businesses.
He has >20 years of experience in the markets, and a good chunk of his last decade’s thought process is well documented on his blog. His portal doesn’t have the best website / UI but the quality of his writing & analysis is first-rate. Despite “only” running a rather low-cost advisory service, he is amongst the most thoughtful fiduciaries I can think of & has a very keen eye on risk management. I’ve read a very large chunk of his public and private write-ups on businesses and I can share with you they are ‘best in class’. Here’s an excerpt from his Jan’19 annual letter (quoting from his 2017 letter to clients):
Abhishek Basumallick – runs Intelsense & offers a range of services beyond the buy & hold approach. Well reputed.
Jatin Khemani – runs Stalwart Advisors, the advisory platform he maintains to share his investment ideas. He’s uncovered some fantastic gems over the past few years, and this site gives a good overview on his it all works. He maintains a very good blog here. A recent talk he gave at the FLAME institute is a good starting point to know something about his thinking. More recently, he gave an excellent talk “Individual Investor’s Real Edge” at TIA, Chennai.