Interview with Kalpen Parekh, Managing Director and CEO, DSP Mutual Fund

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of CEO Insights, where we delve into the minds of the leaders shaping India’s financial and economic landscape. Today, we are joined by a seasoned leader and one of the most respected voices in the Indian asset management industry, Mr. Kalpen Parekh, Managing Director and CEO of DSP Asset Managers. Mr. Kalpen brings with him over two decades of deep experience across client segments, distribution, and marketing. And prior to DSP, he had held key leadership roles at IDFC, Mutual Fund, Birla Sun Life and ICICI Prudential AMC.

Now what sets him apart is not just his strategic acumen but also his candid often contrarian voice on issues that matter to investors. He’s passionate about behavioral finance and believes that investor behavior is one of the most crucial aspects to a good investment experience. Today, let’s dive into his leadership philosophy, his views on markets, investor behavior and the future of asset management in India. Mr. Kalpen, welcome to CEO Insights.

Kalpen Parekh: Hi, thanks for having me.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Let’s start with your personal and leadership journey. And you have seen the evolution of the Indian asset management industry up close. How has your own leadership style evolved along the way and what core values or beliefs guide your decisions as a CEO?

Kalpen Parekh: I think, first of all we are in an industry where we manage something very precious, which is other people’s hard earned money. So a very important ingredient for being in this business is the role of responsibility and fiduciary role that our decisions will have significant bearing on millions of people and families because you know India is a country of middle class or lower middle class savers who are using the vehicle of mutual fund to fulfill significant life goals and create a better financial future. So, for me, this dimension itself is not just inspiring but also puts on me a very large responsible dimension that all decisions that we take as a business, or I take as a leader of this business have to be aligned ultimately to the outcome of the investors. So I think that is something which drives me, which drives all of us at DSP. And because we also invest our own money in the same schemes that we recommend to our investors and that in a way aligns our interest with the interest of the investors or vice versa. So that’s the first point.

Honestly I have not really reflected as much on the type of questions you are asking me about my own leadership style etc. I have always kept in — I’ve learned this right from the first day in my career in ‘98 till now. I was always told and I have tried to imbibe that is, be valuable to your consumers, to your partners, to your colleagues, to your peers, to your seniors, to your organization. And if you are valuable, almost everything else falls in line. The second dimension of leadership is, it’s generally not constant, it is very contextual, depending on environment scenario, point in time, the nature of situations that you are facing at any point in time, so it’s reasonably contextual in that perspective.

And I think another big learning for me, I have been a very strong beneficiary of superlative leaders who have been my leaders and they have been inspiring, they have added value to me, they have helped me learn about the business and give various dimensions of the business to think about them. So it’s about you know, when they have shared so much with me to make me a better leader from where I started my career, I hope to imbibe that and use that in my day-to-day journey, when I deal with my colleagues. So, it is about you know, I call it servant leadership, if you may say, where you serve your ecosystem including your colleagues. And the last thing is a reasonable focus on excellence, because in a country of 150 crore people, you know, not everyone is fortunate enough to get to work in great organizations like this in positions of power and responsibility. Having got that, it is extremely important that the quest for excellence continues to only rise.

I think these are few things, a few lessons that I’ve learned and I try to imbibe them in my day-to-day journey. I have conveyed this without really thinking a lot. I’m just expressing my moments of thought right now.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very interesting. Servant leadership and mark of excellence, continuing excellence, very interesting! Let’s shift gears a little bit and let’s talk about the investor behavior that you particularly focus on a lot at DSP. We often hear the need for long-term investing and resisting FOMO. But in today’s age of instant gratification and all the social media noise around investors, how can AMCs like you truly shape the investor behavior? What do you think the industry gets wrong when it comes to communicating risk aspects to investors?

Kalpen Parekh: It’s not right to speak on behalf of anyone else, leave aside the industry, because again we have our limited time in our life, we should speak about what can we do better. There is always this tug of war between I am right, you are wrong, I am right, industry is wrong, I am right, investor is wrong. Right or wrong is always known in hindsight. I think our approach is very simple. Go back to first principles that real gratification happens with time and that is called compounding, right. In the formula of compounding, time has an exponent attached to it, returns has a plus sign attached to it. And principle has a multiplication sign next to it. So, the most powerful variable is time. So mathematically one should — we should all recognize that time is going to be the biggest contributor to our real absolute wealth creation, not just the percentage of returns. Now, what comes against this, what comes against this big realization?

We all know that time is important but yet why is it so difficult to follow. It is difficult to follow because these higher returns come with a lot of fluctuations and there is no reason to earn higher returns if there are no fluctuations. If returns were very steady, if they were annually predictable, if they were annually fixed, then we should get returns of bonds or fixed income or fixed deposit. So to earn that extra return volatility is part of the game and as a human race, we don’t like uncertainty, especially on our hard earned money, right. Any uncertainty of returns in a way creates uncertainty of our precious goals in life and none of us would want to have uncertainty on our goals. But there’s no way to solve, to be honest. We have to acknowledge that the only truth is higher returns will come with fluctuation and it also means that we need to hope for some luck that the day our goal is getting complete on that day, my returns are good enough for that goal to get fulfilled. So higher returns will come with fluctuation and to avoid fluctuation we have to improve our behavior, our temperament as consumers and investors.

And to some extent there are beautiful products designed by asset managers by mutual funds which help you in managing the volatility or in reducing the volatility and they of course will come with some cost. Because again, the first line is very clear that if you want relatively superior returns, it will come with inferior stability. It means you have to embrace the pain of volatility. I think on day one every investor needs to be clear about this because if we are not clear about this equation and if our expectations are unclear that I will get higher returns as well as higher certainty, then we are setting ourselves up for disappointment and failure.

So the role of an AMC or us at DSP is to do two things. One, we behave the right way, which means we communicate very transparently, honestly, objectively, authentically, rationally about where are we in the cycle. And the idea here is not to say time the markets or we can time the markets in the next one, two or three years, but the idea is to say that if in — if like for the last one year or so a lot of our emphasis has been being that stocks are pricing in very high you know, stocks have run up a lot, past returns are very high. Most likely over a very long period of time, the long-term return of Indian markets have been 12% and if in the last five years we have earned 25-40% return, they are unfair. Be happy that you have earned them but don’t extrapolate them for the calculation of your future goals. Budget for moderation of returns, budget for volatility of returns, budget for fluctuations on what day will fluctuation start we don’t know. So let’s say in March ‘24 also we were saying you know markets are expensive. In June ‘24 also we were saying markets are expensive. In September ‘24 also we were saying markets are expensive. And all through markets were only rising. So in the short term, while they were expensive but the markets continue to rise and then post September the volatility started hitting us. And now is when consumers are also realizing that yes markets were expensive we should have been more disciplined.

So point we make is that, our job, what should be our role as a money manager is to very objectively communicate the facts and the truth. And then that in itself should help investors judge that okay today I have to put new money, do I choose a fund with higher degree of fluctuation or moderate degree of fluctuation or lower degree of fluctuation. And also match it with my appetite for fluctuation, because there are some investors who have the temperament to ignore fluctuations and there are some investors who actually panic a lot with the first 5% or 10% correction. So first objective is that we communicate with objective facts and data and the second objective is again you know different investors want to invest at different points in time in different product lines. So when we launch new funds or when we communicate about where to invest today, what makes more sense today, we again articulate that objectively. We try coming up with new funds where these funds or themes are in low cycle, where the past returns are poor, where it is difficult for us to market these funds. Because when the past returns are poor, most of us don’t like to invest, because we think that past returns are poor, this could be a bad fund. But most likely, this could be a better idea for the future, because most of the risk has already played out. So that’s another thing that as a responsible AMC, we try to apply some of our learnings in terms of our product launches.

So if you look back in the last one, two, three, four, five so many years, and just math when did we launch a new product or when did we communicate about investing in a new theme or an existing theme and what was the rationale behind it? The common pattern that you will find is that most of these themes were less popular, they were not in fashion, their last one year, two year, five year returns were either negative or very moderate and the valuations were reasonable or cheap, margin of safety was relatively better than something else in the market. And then we also, like I said, whenever we launch new funds, we also put our own money in these funds to ensure that if it is right for you, we better ensure that it’s right for us, by putting our own capital. So these are few steps that we take.

So in summary, communicate objectively the facts. Highlight what are the risks and opportunities, not just the opportunities. Because when we highlight just the opportunities, we are only talking to the greed part of the human mind. We need to also talk about likely risk, because in investing things can go wrong or we don’t get everything right. So it’s important we give a very balanced perspective so that the consumer knows whether this idea is right for me or not. And the third thing is, raise money or launch funds generally in low cycle. Fourth thing is invest our own money in most of the funds that we bring to the market and highlight. There are times we also communicate that if asset classes have turned very expensive, choose SIP as an investment option, rather than investing in lump sum. Also just to quantify all that I said in the last few minutes, in the last 24 months, most of our fundraising has been in our multi-asset fund because that diversified the risk of a single asset class of equities. Because in our multi-asset class, we have four different components; Indian equities, global equities, gold silver, and bonds. So over the last year or 18 months, because of our stands that markets are very expensive, we said this is a better way to invest, diversified. Gold had some positive triggers in our understanding. Bonds we felt were attractive because yields were high and we were likely to see softening of interest rates over the last 18 months so a multi-asset fund allows us to spread out the choices in a portfolio and reduce the risk when one particular asset class is very expensive, which was equities one year back. We raised a lot of money in our equity savings fund which had only 30% in equities. And I’m very pleased to note that a lot of investors who understood this framework and these are not very popular or common funds. An equity savings fund most people may not even know about the existence of this category. That whole category, in this entire collection, has fallen only by 2% — 2%, 2.5% because it only invests around one third in equity. So someone who didn’t have very aggressive appetite this could have been a better product.

And then we also raised money in our multi-cap fund. Now, the multi-cap fund by default needs to have minimum 25 in small cap and minimum 25 in mid-cap, which means it has a more aggressive risk profile In context to last 12 months where mid and small caps were more expensive. So we launched this fund as an NFO, but as an SIP NFO, where we told investors don’t invest in lump sum do it more as an SIP. So we were able to make investors use SIP. So today in this correction, when small caps and mid-caps are correcting sharply, the SIP investor is able to keep acquiring more units versus someone who had just put money one-time in the NFO but now doesn’t have any new money. So these are few things we try to do simple things no rocket science. And I think most of us in the fund industry; do come with this mindset of guiding our investors the right way. I think the most important thing that I’m happy about how DSP operates in its communication and marketing approach is that when the investor gets very aggressive or very excited about investing, it’s important to tone that down because as human beings we always get excited towards the last leg of that asset class’s journey. So we tend to counterbalance, not because we want to counterbalance, not because we just want to be contrarian because that is what data is guiding us. And let me also in all transparency and honesty highlight that these are our inferences. There are times our inferences may not be right, we also go wrong. We don’t claim to say that we can forecast the world with 100% certainty. The world is inherently unknowable. There are millions of moving parts and inherently uncertain. We don’t want to impose false certainty on something which is naturally uncertain. So we want to help investors acknowledge this reality that markets fluctuate, returns fluctuate and hence find a way of investing where fluctuations don’t push you out of your journey of compounding, in fact they can become your friend. And that’s where we encourage a lot of hybrid investing where fluctuations can be taken advantage of. We encourage a lot of multi-asset investing, asset allocation based investing, SIP based investing, in phases like the last year or two where valuations have been very high. When the market phase changes, maybe our approach and communication and you know guidance to our investors also will change.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very, very interesting observations. Let me take a stab at that sort of the end that you mentioned that the India growth story that we have been talking about has taken a hit with broader market taking a beating, especially starting this year. What are your views? Do you think the market has already priced in most of the pessimism or are there still sectors where investors probably are underestimating today that can be potential? And what sort of a dip have you seen generally in — we keep hearing these market headlines that investors are panicking, they have stopped their SIPs. So from an AMC perspective, what kind of views do you have?

Kalpen Parekh: So I’ll answer the second part first because that is what can generally catch attention or headlines. And to be honest, anyone who asked me this question I also will say that these data points should not matter to you. As an aside, I want to just add that most of these questions and the answers to these questions have no bearing on the investor outcome or add no value to let’s say you or your father or mother or spouse as an investor. What is happening to market trends has no bearing for someone who is doing a 20 year SIP, because what I’m going to make is very different than the answer to today’s question. So there are obviously nervous investors, anxious investors, as well as wise investors. And we have all three and we see all the three types of behaviors. There is a small group, like always, wise investors are generally small in group because they have experienced market cycles, they understand that the best time to get excited is when prices are falling, not when they are rising. Risk of the market comes down when prices come down, not when they go up. So that investor is rebalancing little bit is gradually adding more to equities. There is a group of investors who feel that, okay I thought that I will get 25% return but now the last one year returns are gradually now turning negative. Whatever positive returns I have let me take it out first. So we are seeing that behavior also. At large, there is a maybe 10-12% slowdown in our numbers. But that’s, you know, we still are getting a meaningful chunk of SIPs. At an industry level also, the absolute numbers still continue to rise. The rate of growth is marginally lower. And it’s too early, because I would want to watch for three, four, six months before saying that this is a trend. So that’s the first comment I have.

Whether it is a dent on the India growth story or not, again stock price performance itself should not be an indicator to judge the prospects of growth of our country. In fact I would urge all the listeners to read the document that we publish on every month for Netra. A few months back we had highlighted that the long-term growth prospects of our economy has always been in the range of 6-8%. And if you start extrapolating a higher growth rate then you are making a mistake. It is not the mistake of the country’s growth story, it is you who is unnecessarily extrapolating and not looking at objective data in fact. So there are few years when we are coming from a low cycle or a slowdown where instead of eight we’ll go at nine or 10 in terms of nominal — in terms of our core GDP growth rate, without adjusting for inflation. So 6% to 7.5% has been the broad range. In tough cycles we go down to 6%. In better times we go back to 7.5% or in some years we have gone to 8% also. But to think of 9 and 10 and 11 and 12 is creating too many rosy expectations and setting yourself up for unnecessary failure. And more than the growth rate of the economy, I think – see there are a lot of data points at different points in the cycle where the growth rate does not convert into stock market return or vice versa. So there are many countries in the world, China for example, which has grown the fastest in the last 20 years. But the stock market has not necessarily, in the same period, delivered the highest return. The US market has earned the best return, for example, in the last decade, even though the economy has grown slower than India or China or many other parts of the world. So the single line equations are actually bad lessons or bad oversimplified lessons that we unnecessarily take and try to corrupt our investing approach.

So basically, growth will have cycles; our growth also will have cycles. If world growth slows down, to some extent we’ll also slow down. And likewise markets will have cycles. Now, if the stock market is reflecting a very aggressive profit growth rate of 20-25%, which is what it was till few months back or two, three quarters back. That is where chances of volatility goes up significantly is what past experience tells you, because if you take again the long-term, 30 year profit growth rate of corporate India, that resonates between 12-14%. There are short periods of three, four years where we’ll grow at 20% because the last three years were very poor. And there are short periods when we grow at 8-9%, like we are growing at 8-9% because we are coming on a slightly cycle time. But the core growth rate is around 12-14%.

So whenever the stock market is budgeting in much higher growth rates to higher valuation is when you have to become a bit conservative if you are doing new lump sum investing at that point in time. But if you are doing an SIP installment every month then most of these things become irrelevant. You have to keep acquiring units. So let’s say, I have started an SIP at the peak in the last year, which was 26th of September, 2024. On that day my first SIP went. That SIP, today, assume it was done in Nifty 50 or in our large cap fund, that SIP is down around 12%, that first installment. The second installment is down around 8%, the third installment is down 3%, the fourth installment is down 2%.

I have done a 10 year SIP. I’m giving my own example where I’m doing, let’s say 10 year SIP. So 10 year SIP is 120 installments. I’ve only invested six installments in the last six months. So the return of these six installments, whether it is highly positive or negative or neutral will not have any material bearing on the entire SIP. Because over 120 months, generally we know that in 10 years we will see multiple cycles. We will see a phase of stock prices going nowhere and NAVs remaining sideways. We will see a phase of rising NAVs; we will see a phase of falling NAVs. So to a new investor who has started his SIP, actually he is better off because he’s starting with a phase of falling NAVs which means he’s acquiring more units. And some point in the future, if past is likely to be repeated that a country like India with capitalism and democracy and a 15% return on equity and a 12-14% profit growth rate, generally the stock market delivers those type of returns. You are acquiring units low; be patient, complete your full cycle of 10 years. And no point in time a 10 year SIP has earned less than fixed deposits or bonds. It may have earned 4% more, it may have earned 6% more. It may have earned 10% more in some cases, if you have got lucky. But compared to other asset classes, generally it has delivered better returns. So investors have — investors need to think from that lens.

The other way to think about these things is that, okay, if SIP’s installments are going to have you know the volatility of the market of this extent, let me do my SIP in a hybrid fund, do it in balanced fund which has 30% bonds and 70% in stocks. The volatility will be lesser. The long-term return will be maybe 1% lower than equity. But at least you don’t panic with headlines or statements like investors are closing their SIPs. So two days back, my father who doesn’t even have an SIP, he’s a retired person with 80 years old. All his money is already invested; he has no new cash flow to worry about. His money is invested to series of hybrid funds, well allocated. His NAV is down only around 3% in this correction versus 15% of market fall. He also read some headline and said, are investors exiting, are SIPs stopping? So I asked him, if the answer is yes, what changes for you? If the answer is no, what changes for you? Nothing.

So let this noise of what others are doing not affect your behavior as an investor because each one of us has our own journeys to cover in terms of money, our financial goals, and each one of us has our own risk appetite. If your portfolio is designed to your own risk appetite and time horizon, what others are doing actually does not matter. And I’m not dismissing your question or trivializing your question. I’m only saying that if you want to be a better investor, stop worrying about others. Focus on how will you behave in good times, don’t become too greedy. In bad times don’t become too fearful. And why so, because in bad times, stocks come back to what their fair prices are and that is the best time to invest in that asset class. This is the biggest hack that people need to have that in falling prices my risk is coming down and in rising prices I need to be more careful. Unfortunately, the human brain is wired to celebrate rising prices and to become very sad when prices are falling. So today’s falling prices should make me sad if I need the money today and if I have to redeem the money today. But if I don’t need money for the next five or ten years, today’s rising price also will not matter to me or have any effect, neither will falling prices.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very well explained. These are the kind of questions that we constantly get on our platform. So this is reassuring for people listening to this podcast, what they need to do. I’m glad you gave personal examples as well.

Kalpen Parekh: We have to say that, you’re right that these are the questions we get asked. Now, as long as the question is about what should I do about my portfolio, it’s very important to answer them. But if the question is about what are others doing, what is the future of the economy, like I said, even when I tell you economy is doing very great, stocks have fallen 40%. And there are times when economy was not doing very great, stocks went up by 100%. So the answer to probably wrong questions will not add any value to you. And I think a lot of effort needs to be made by all of us together in terms of what are the better questions to ask.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Sure. To that extent, Mr. Kalpen, India as you said, 150 crore people and roughly 5-6% of the population are investing in financial products or doing SIPs. There’s been a lot of — I see constantly whenever I see cricket, “Mutual Fund Sahi Hai” ads. But there is an increasing commoditization happening in mutual fund products. Lot of thematic funds come in, investors sort of are confused. And now we are even hearing about sachetization of mutual funds. So can you share your thought process and how do you differentiate yourself in this crowded market and what sort of a investor education, especially when their portfolios go down, what are your views on that?

Kalpen Parekh: I’ll go back to what I started by saying that our effort of education is on two dimensions, one is what should be the right temperament we should bring to this game. If you are going into the game of playing cricket, we should know the rules of cricket and the dos and don’ts of cricket. Likewise if we are coming to the game of investing, then the rules of the game are, invest for long term, markets will fluctuate, returns will go through ups and downs. The only way to cushion the volatility or fluctuation for you is asset allocation and SIP. So these are five things that we non-stop, constantly keep talking about. Again let me also say that the tools are very few in this business. There aren’t too many new dimensions to talk about. There are limited three, four dimensions to talk about. And long-term makes money, short-term is volatile. Asset allocation helps take advantage of volatility. SIPs help taking advantage of volatility. So these are the few things we have to keep repeating again and again till this 5% number goes to maybe 20% or 25%. So one is, key messages or core principles don’t need innovation. We don’t need innovation of messages; we may need innovation of delivery of messages. The logics are same but can we deliver it in different formats. Sometimes we deliver them in a very boring format because that is important because sometimes adding too much of humor trivializes the message. Sometimes we deliver through blogs. Sometimes we deliver through — a few years back we had done a series of stand-up comedians who actually explained that why looking at other people’s returns or past returns is a very bad way of investing.

So I think our strategy is to identify these truths of investing, the truths of markets and the truths of our behavior and try to constantly communicate around it in multiple fashions. That’s one. And the second point is, for very few investors who really have that time and the bandwidth and the ability to read through data and analysis, we communicate every month and three months and six months through series of knowledge documents like Netra, like transcript, like report card, where we highlight how is the economy doing, what sectors are doing well or not well, which asset classes look attractive, which asset classes look less attractive. Where do we see volatility? What are the triggers, which is more nuanced? We published that also. So we continue to focus on these two dimensions and I don’t think we need to do new things because the runway for more people to come into mutual fund investing is still very large. We do have 5 crore investors who have come in, who have come in, in good times. We also are honest about saying that investing will have bad times also, you can’t take them out. There’s no point in expecting what is unreal. And that’s where I said that we try to on day one communicate both sides of the coin that in investing you will have good times and bad times. Be aware of it in good time. Now, if I go and tell someone that in investing there are bad times when already times are bad, I will not have credibility to make that person understand. So our whole idea is be balanced at all points in time. In good times talk about bad times, in bad times talk about good times, give the full picture and give the toolkit of what are right templates to invest. And at all points in time, not all messaging is effective. I would be more happy if investors really buy our messaging. So it means two things. We have to constantly work on improving our messaging to make it more effective, to make it more human, make it more real. And on the other hand, many consumers don’t want to embrace the right principles of investing because the right principles of investing need a lot of sacrifice. It needs giving up on a lot of temporary gains. Just before coming in for this interview, I read something — I heard something very inspiring. So Ravi Shastri was talking I think in one of the interviews to some journalists and someone asked him about why is Virat Kohli your favorite player. And he said that he’s my favorite player because of discipline. He’s most successful, he’s most popular. He has so many distractions in front of him, distractions in terms of the type of food he can eat, the type of lifestyle he can choose, the type of popularity he has, he can go wayward. But he has chosen to sleep on time; he has chosen to avoid bad food by giving up things. He has chosen to come on the nets on time, he has chosen to choose a particular difficult regimen of exercising, because he knows that I still have few more years to play and I want to be the best in my game. And to be the best in my game I have to sacrifice something today.

So we all see the — we all hero worship the good in him. But that good in him has come from sacrificing a lot of temporary joys or gains. And this is not just about Virat Kohli; this is true about anyone who has achieved excellence in life that you give up something to get something more than everyone else. I think in investing, giving up on temptations, giving up on chasing past returns, giving up on greed, giving up on unreal return expectations, giving up on investing in things which can be part of party conversations and versus that saying that no I am in a simple index fund or I’m in a simple Flexicap fund, I don’t have these hot stocks. These are things to give up. So there are few investors who are able to take that journey and I think they will succeed. Market is meant for such disciplined investors.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Very well put together and a great analogy for people to understand who are listening, be the Virat Kohli in investing. Let’s pick the conversation where you mentioned from 5% to 25% journey of the investor base expansion. SEBI had recently launched sort of a sachet product when it comes to mutual funds. What are your views on that and DSP as a fund house, are you planning to get into the sachetization? I’m not sure if you have already done that. And what are your views generally of increasing the market base?

Kalpen Parekh: See the sachetization would of course help a lot of people who either want to just test out investing and not put too much of – could not start with INR1,000 or INR3,000. By the way, even before this, the INR100 SIP was already available for investors. We already have a INR100 SIP. And so it will definitely expand the bottom of the pyramid who is not coming to capital markets. At the same time it will be very important to set their expectations right because, let’s say, you and me losing 20% on NAV will not change our life. But someone in that bucket, losing 10%, 15%, 20% can have significantly different outcomes. So how we guide them via conservative funds becomes more important. So that is what our intent is that encourage investors to come in conservative funds, hybrid funds to start with, especially when past returns are very high even now, notwithstanding the correction of the last two, three months.

And the other thing from a strategy point of view from our marketing perspective is to again communicate — to have effective communication is very important to have interesting communication, because if communication is not very interesting there is so much of over communication on every part of our life that most things become blind spots. Every brand is shouting, screaming and we end up closing our eyes and ears. On a birthday, when I opened my email, there are 35 unwanted emails in a way from non-humans wishing me a birthday, whether it is a fund brand or a bank brand or an insurance brand or a shopping brand from which I would have given my date of birth. Now there’s so much of over communication. So I think our focus at DSP has been less communication but relevant communication. Communicate around things that matter to the consumer. We spend a lot of time trying to think, put ourselves in the shoes of the consumer that when he is receiving my email what is his reason to open my email, why should he open my email. Because I’m actually becoming an intruder in his day-to-day life, so my email better be valuable or relevant. It will not be just five funds that we are launching and why you should invest or because it’s your birthday today start an SIP or because it is Raksha Bandhan, start an SIP, because on Raksha Bandhan we don’t think about money. On Diwali, it’s okay to celebrate on those days and not think about money.

So I think our focus continues to be simple in our communication, be effective in our communication. We are also learning and hoping to be more effective. And I think, yeah, that’s what I can say at this point.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Excellent. Mr. Kalpen, this is one question that I ask every guest in my show. For my listeners, who are from — our demographic is from Gen Z to Millennials to retirees. Recommend sort of few books, ideally three, not just from investing but from general philosophical point of view that basically has touched you in many ways, so what would it be?

Kalpen Parekh: See I like one book which is generally on decision making. And it’s a very complex topic because decision making is not easy when you have to make choices every day in a constantly moving world. How do you — what should be the framework of decision making? And that, if applied to investing can make you a better investor. It has made me a better investor at least since the time I read that book. This is a book called, “The Art of Thinking Clearly” by Rolf Dobelli. A lot of the concepts are extremely complex concepts which he has explained in very simple interesting language for stories. So I have really found that book very useful for some of my decision making or somewhere looking at the world a bit differently than how the world looks at the world. And it helps you in narrowing down to what matters versus too much of noise.

The second book which I like, this is in the spirit of learning for myself to be a better communicator or to be a less poorer communicator is a book called “Damn Good Advice.” It’s a book on advertising. I really love that a lot. There’s another book called “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots.” I really, you know, when I read that book I felt it is my biography, because I have also been talking like an idiot many times without realizing that the other person is maybe not even able to understand what I’m saying, and hence why it’s important to talk the language of consumers. So these two books really helped me a lot in my own learning of communication.

The last book I’ll recommend is Cosmos by Carl Sagan which is about the big universe. And that book has got nothing to do with life per se in a way or investing per se but it again tells you that so many things are unknowable, we almost don’t matter. And if we almost don’t matter then what we say also doesn’t matter. So take everything that I say with a lot of pinch of salt. We make estimates with good intent and good honesty when we give our opinions and recommendations. They sometimes go right, they sometimes go wrong. Huge role of love in our existence as a human race is what this book tells us. So should not take ourselves too seriously and do things the right way. And there are two more authors I will talks about which are very relevant from a personal finance perspective. Monika Halan, she has written simple books on investing Let’s Talk Money or Let’s Talk Mutual Funds. I think everyone should read that if you want to be a better investor. Another advisor who’s influenced me a lot is PV Subramanyam who’s written this book “Retire Rich”. His handle is Subramoney, yeah, so again, very relevant concepts. So what I like about these two books is, it talks about things that matter to you as an individual, it doesn’t talk about the world or the market or US or China, things which you can’t do anything about. It says that if the cards that are dealt to you are these, what can you do with them, focus on that. So these are some Indian authors who bring more relevance to your journey as an investor. And I think all these three constituents, right from Gen Z to Millennials to retirees; they will find some of these books extremely useful.

I like one twitter handle of this guy D. Muthukrishnan from Chennai. He writes about investing in very short tweets. I think he has mastered the art of communicating decades of insights into one, one tweet, into very short brief statements. So there are so many good people around us from whom we can learn the right things that matter to us. I like Shyam Sekhar again on his — but he is someone known to me, he’s not written a book but if someone reads how he thinks and writes in the world of investing, he navigates investors very responsibly and he expresses that. So there are many people who do that. There will be hundreds of them and these are some of them who express it very eloquently, very simply and investors can learn from that.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Excellent, excellent set of recommendations. And you know Subramoney and Muthukrishnan and Shyam Sekhar, I have personally benefited from reading their blogs and twitter handles, as well as Monica Ma’am’s columns on newspapers as well. Great set of recommendations, I’m sure this is going to benefit a lot of our listeners. And here’s a shout out to your team behind DSP Netra and Transcript because I personally read them the moment it’s published. And I think I’ve communicated that to your team earlier also that it’s excellent work. Thanks Mr. Kalpen.

Kalpen Parekh: Thanks for saying that because they do a lot of hard work. Actually, reading Netra takes 15 minutes but preparing Netra takes one month. Because every day’s collective dialogues that we do, collective learning that we have, whether it is Netra or Transcript, to put it out, we spend a lot of sincere time and effort to ensure it is contextual, relevant, honest and objective. They are very pure documents; they don’t have any sales agenda, any business agenda behind it. It was a think tank we created during Covid times to say that, okay, how can DSP be useful to our investors, how can we be valuable to you to relevant investment insights and insights which can be applied, not just read. So these are two documents you mentioned, but I’ll just add a few more for your reading so that in the next session you can think and talk about it. We have the Navigator. We have the Report Card. Then the Annual Report Nectar. And if you want to learn about fixed income and macro and currencies or forex it is Converse. So we have some seven different documents that we publish at different points in time, which is very all-encompassing from an investor who wants to look at data and form your dots which over time you can connect better.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Interesting. Okay I have only read Netra and Transcript and I highly recommend it to everyone. I’m going to check out your site and see how I can subscribe to all of them. Thank you Mr. Kalpen for your time, it’s definitely reassuring to my audience. They are going to enjoy, they are going to understand the importance of staying invested and not go behind the noise. And I look forward to more such conversations with you in the future thanks for your time.

Kalpen Parekh: Thank you for hosting me. All the best to all of you.

Radhakrishnan Chonat: Thank you.

Kalpen Parekh: Thanks.