by Malay Shah, Principal Advisor at CrispIdea
In the last week of March 2020, with the world locked down and the markets in freefall, I split half of my deployable portfolio into the safest asset I know. The other half went into the riskiest conviction I had.
I will tell you what those two assets were, and what happened to them. First you need to understand the twenty years that taught me to make that trade without flinching. By the end of this article you will also know exactly where every rupee of mine sits today, mistake by mistake, brag by brag.
Let us go back to the beginning.
2001. The market takes my first lesson before my first salary.
I graduated straight into the dot-com bust. The job market for freshers had evaporated, and I was fortunate to land my first job at McKinsey. That downturn handed me a lesson before I owned a single share: in a bad market, your human capital is your best asset. Skills compound even when portfolios cannot.
2005. I start buying something at 450 dollars.
Four years into my career, I began quietly accumulating an asset that most of my peers considered a relic. It traded at around 450 dollars an ounce. My colleagues were buying tech stocks. I was buying this. Hold that thought. It becomes the spine of this entire story.
2006. Infosys pays for my first house.
My first real wealth came from Infosys ESOPs. Those options funded my first real estate purchase in 2006. I want to be honest about this. Luck and timing did most of the work. Equity in the right employer, granted at the right time, converted into a hard asset before I fully understood what I was doing. The framework came later. That house, though, was about to teach me something no framework in a textbook covers.
2007. The rupee stands at 40. I move my life across it.
India was at the peak of its growth fervour. The Sensex was setting records, everyone was euphoric, and USDINR stood at 40, the strongest rupee I have transacted in as an adult. I moved back from the USA and converted my dollar savings into rupees near the best exchange rate the rupee would see for the next two decades.
Nobody rang a bell to tell me that. Remember the number 40. It is the first rung of a ladder this article will keep climbing.
2008. The world breaks within a year of my landing.
The Global Financial Crisis hit within a year of my return. I watched it unfold from India, having just repatriated my capital, and learned that the biggest risks are the ones you never even track. I was watching equity markets. I should also have been watching currency. The metal I had been buying since 2005 held firm while everything around it fell. I noticed.
2009. The house doubles. I draw the wrong conclusion.
My 2006 purchase doubled by 2009. Three years, 100 percent. I concluded that Indian real estate was a wealth machine, and that conclusion sat in my head, loaded, waiting for the worst possible moment to fire.
2013. The rupee hits 58. I sign a document I will regret for a decade.
By 2013 the rupee had slid from 40 to 68, the second rung of the ladder, and I made the single worst capital allocation decision of my life. I signed the papers with full confidence, backed by the 2009 experience, certain I was being shrewd.
I will tell you what was in that document. Let it sit for now, the way it sat on my balance sheet for seven years.
2015. The rupee hits 64. I finally see the pattern.
Third rung. The rupee had now lost a third of its dollar value since my return, and I began to see what this ladder does to the Indian middle class. Depreciation works as a silent tax on aspiration. The family that dreams of a foreign vacation, a child studying abroad, an iPhone, or imported healthcare pays in a currency that keeps shrinking against the price tag. Salary increments arrive in rupees. Aspirations are increasingly priced in dollars.
The conclusion I reached, later than I should have, is that every aspirational Indian household needs a non-rupee corpus, built to match future dollar liabilities with dollar assets. If your child may study abroad in 2035, some part of your portfolio should already live in the currency of that fee receipt. I reached this conclusion in my head years before I sized it in my portfolio. That gap has a cost, and it appears in the mistakes section below.
2020. The rupee nears 74. The envelopes open.
Now we return to that week in March 2020, and I can name the two assets.
The safe half went into gold, the metal I had been buying since 2005 at 450 dollars. The risky half went into the Motilal Oswal Nasdaq 100 fund, at a NAV of around 33 rupees.
When fear is extreme, the middle of the risk curve is the worst place to be. Own the asset that protects you if the world breaks, and the asset that multiplies if it holds together. Skip the mediocre middle. That is the entire barbell philosophy, and COVID was its perfect laboratory.
The Nasdaq fund now trades around 330 rupees. A ten-bagger in under six years, powered by three engines running together: US tech earnings, multiple expansion, and rupee depreciation quietly adding to every NAV print. And the gold? Gold did something so strange that it deserves its own chapter, because it made me richer and poorer in the same move.
2026. My net-worth hit an all time high but I lost 50% of my wealth. Both of these statements are true.
Last year my net worth hit an all-time high. By my own measurement, I had lost half my wealth. Both statements are true, and the gap between them is the most useful idea in this article.
First, the brag, which I have earned over twenty years. Gold has gone from my 2005 entry near 450 dollars to above 4,100 dollars, roughly nine times in dollar terms. Layer on rupee depreciation from the mid-40s to the mid-90s and my rupee returns on that early gold are close to twenty five times. The sceptics who called it a dead asset were wrong, and they were wrong in the most expensive way possible.
Now the twist. Run this arithmetic on your own portfolio. Suppose your net worth was 1 crore rupees when gold was around 1,900 dollars an ounce, roughly 60,000 rupees per 10 grams. Converted into metal, your entire net worth was about 1,667 grams of gold. If 15 percent of the portfolio was in gold, you held 250 grams, and the other 1,417 grams existed only as a claim, denominated in a depreciating currency.
Gold then moves to 1.5 lakh rupees per 10 grams. Your 15 lakhs of gold becomes 37.5 lakhs on its own. Even if the rest of the portfolio went nowhere, your net worth is now 1.225 crores. In rupees, you are 22.5 percent richer and feeling rather pleased. In gold, your net worth is 817 grams. You started with 1,667. More than half your wealth, measured in the world’s oldest currency, is gone, and the entire rupee gain came from the shrinking of the ruler you measure it with.
It is the same illusion as rupee depreciation, one level deeper. First you learn your salary is worth less in dollars. Then you learn your dollars are worth less in gold. Whenever your net worth hits a new high, convert it into grams before celebrating. It is the fastest humility check in finance.
The rupee touches 96. I learn a new times table.
The ladder now reads 40, 57, 64, 79, 96. As a practical matter, I have had to relearn my mental conversion tables four times. I started my India innings fluent in the 40 times table. Today I do my conversions in the 100 times table, and my school maths teacher would be pleased to know the practice finally found a use.
The document from 2013, opened.
Time to fire the gun I planted earlier. The document I signed in 2013 was a sale order and a purchase deed together. I sold equity to buy real estate.
That was within a year or two of the start of one of the great Indian bull markets. The property I bought sat at essentially the same price until 2020. Seven years, roughly zero, while the equity I sold went on a historic run. I sold the asset about to jump and bought the asset about to sleep.
Put my two properties side by side and you get the real lesson of Indian real estate. The 2006 house doubled in three years. The 2013 house did nothing for seven. Prices here move in step-jumps, long flat plateaus punctuated by violent repricing, and your outcome depends almost entirely on where in that staircase you enter. Anyone modelling Indian property at a smooth 10 percent annual appreciation has yet to own it across a full cycle. The step-jump punishes sellers of the wrong asset as brutally as it rewards patient holders of the right one. In 2013 I was both.
My second confession pairs with it. I watched the rupee climb every rung from 40 to 96, wrote about it, joked about it, and still kept the bulk of my wealth in rupee assets. Gold gave me indirect dollar exposure, which softened the damage. Direct dollar assets would have done more. The person best positioned to see it coming failed to size the trade.
The least suspenseful part of my portfolio.
One corner of my money has no plot twists at all, by design. My children’s college corpus runs on instruments as simple as PPF, compounding tax-free, year after year, untouched. Exempt on contribution, exempt on accumulation, exempt on withdrawal. There is no fund manager to evaluate, no exit load, no timing decision, and no temptation to tinker. Their best feature, even better than the tax treatment, is the boredom. These accounts are dull enough that you leave them alone, and leaving them alone is where the compounding lives.
The reveal: where every rupee sits today.
I promised you the full picture. Here it is.
- Gold: 25 percent. I should confess this number is inflated by price appreciation rather than fresh buying. Gold promoted itself.
- Equities: 30 percent. Within this, 40 percent sits in large-cap and value funds, 30 percent in direct equities where I back my own research, and 30 percent in small-cap and thematic funds for asymmetric bets.
- Real estate: 25 percent. Deliberately capped and reducing in number as other asset classes grow. The typical affluent Indian family holds 60 to 70 percent of its wealth in property, illiquid, concentrated in one or two cities, yielding 2 to 3 percent in rent, repricing once a decade if the cycle cooperates. Buying property is easy in this country. Stopping is the discipline.
- Retirement: 15 percent. PPF, EPF, and an annuity account. The compulsory, tax-advantaged, untouchable layer.
- Liquid: 4 to 5 percent. Enough to act on the two or three days a decade when everyone else is frozen. March 2020 was one of those days.
And one line that belongs in this reveal even though it carries no percentage: I am debt free. No home loan, no leverage, no EMI extracting a fixed tribute from my cash flow every month. In a country where the middle class routinely commits 40 to 50 percent of household income to EMIs, being debt free is optionality. It is the reason I could open those two envelopes in March 2020 while leveraged households were praying for moratoriums.
What I would tell my 2005 self
Buy the gold, exactly as you did. Buy the Nasdaq earlier and bigger. Keep the 2006 flat, skip the 2013 one. Build the dollar corpus the day you see USDINR cross 50, well before it crosses 90. And keep the PPF accounts boring.
My wealth came from holding a small number of correct convictions for an uncomfortably long time, staying out of debt, and keeping enough liquidity to act when everyone else is frozen.
That is the whole playbook. It fits on a page. Knowing it takes an afternoon. Doing it takes twenty years.
Author
Malay Shah is a Co-Founder and Principal Advisor at CrispIdea, a modern Wealth Management firm. CrispIdea is on a mission to build the next $1T of wealth for India’s affluent professionals by democratizing institutional-grade intelligence. Prior to CrispIdea, Malay was a revenue leader at many AI start-ups and he spent more than 2 decades in the management consulting profession.
Disclaimer:
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investments in unlisted, pre-IPO and near-IPO securities carry significant risk, including illiquidity and total loss of capital. Company data and share prices referenced are as of mid-July 2026 and will have changed. Tax rules are subject to change and depend on individual circumstances. Please consult a SEBI-registered adviser and a qualified tax professional before making any investment decision.