Frequently Asked Questions

Glad you asked. Imagine you are driving on a highway. You have a choice of multiple lanes to pick from and your goal is to get to your destination fast, but also safe. Our portfolios are constructed similarly, except that instead of the goal being getting to the destination faster, our goal is make a higher return, but by taking only the appropriate amount of risk. 

See this video to understand more. 

Alternately if you prefer the written word, read this blog post to understand more. 

Wrong question to ask. The right question would be “How do I get high returns consistently”? Investing in start-ups is one way of getting high returns, but the risk is also high, hence it fails the “consistency” test. 

There is always a trade-off made knowingly or unknowingly between return and risk. Our algo models attempt to maximize the return for a level of risk that you are comfortable with. 

Read this blog post to understand more. 

Right question to ask. More often than not, we let our emotions come in the way of making logical decisions. We envy the neighbor who bought Amazon back in 1999, but do we really appreciate the fact that this neighbor held Amazon even when it dropped by more than 90% in 2000? 

In this blog post we explain some of the portfolio performance metrics.

The key here is the word “large”. Small drops are opportunities, large drops are scary and can wipe out a portfolio.

Imagine a runner. If a runner runs too fast, he has to take a break before he continues with his regular pace. It is the same with the market, there will be ups and downs and some of the “downs” are pretty large like the drop in 2008-2009 of almost 50%. 

The key is to distinguish between when the runner is getting tired vs. “having a heart attack”. We do that and protect our portfolios using an “opportunistic” hedge. 

Read this blog post to understand our hedging mechanisms

Good question. We select our algorithms and strategies based on their real-life performance and back-tested historical performance. 

There is always the chance that a particular strategy will not perform in a market cycle. For example, the 60:40 stocks and bonds portfolio did not perform at all during the first half of 2022

Imagine a team consisting of multiple players. Players that perform consistently are retained in the team and players that under-perform are benched. We use a similar mechanism in our portfolios which we are terming as “Evolution”.  The portfolios are constantly evolving, rewarding strategies that perform well and penalizing strategies that don’t. 

Read this blog post to understand how our evolution mechanism works

It depends. We can get you a 10% return per year, we can also get you a 80% return per year. The “return” you get depends on risk profile, tax preference and “emotional health”!! Yes, Emotional health is one of the parameter that dictates your return.

Click here to check our daily and historic model performance 

Read this blog post to understand the efficient frontier and how that is relevant.