{"id":290,"date":"2025-10-01T17:07:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T17:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/?p=290"},"modified":"2026-08-24T10:13:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T10:13:39","slug":"from-scarcity-to-abundance-vikaas-sachdeva-on-the-evolving-landscape-of-indian-investment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/podcast\/from-scarcity-to-abundance-vikaas-sachdeva-on-the-evolving-landscape-of-indian-investment\/","title":{"rendered":"From Scarcity to Abundance: Vikaas Sachdeva on the Evolving Landscape of Indian Investment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vikaas M Sachdeva, Co-Chair of the IVCA CAT III Council, joined Vivek Law on the Simple Hai! show to discuss the evolution of Indian investment.<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The transformative journey of the Indian investment sector, the rise of mutual funds and the explosive growth of alternative investments \u2013 these formed the crux of the conversation between Vikaas Sachdeva, Co-Chair of the IVCA CAT III Council and veteran finance journalist Vivek Law on the Simple Hai! Show recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mutual fund industry has seen tremendous growth over the years and Sachdeva broke down this evolution into three key stages:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guaranteed Returns Era<\/strong>: This early stage featured products like UTI and Morgan Stanley. While people invested and made money, there was a fundamental lack of understanding; mutual funds were often equated with stocks. This led to information asymmetry, with even \u201cgrey market premiums\u201d running on NFOs (New Fund Offers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around 1997\u201398, institutions like Birla, ICICI, and HDFC began educating investors on mutual fund concepts. This period saw significant regulatory and taxation changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alignment and Campaign Success<\/strong>: The current phase, starting around 2016, marked the alignment of product, regulation and distribution structures. A major trigger was the \u201cMutual Funds Sahi Hai\u201d campaign, which, despite initial resistance, saw phenomenal success, leading to a six fold growth in the industry in just ten years. At that time, there were approximately 10 crore SIP accounts, a stark contrast to the late 1990s when collecting a single \u20b95,000 application involved significant physical effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Investor Maturity Curve<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When questioned about the corresponding shift in investor behavior, Sachdeva noted that maturity was still variable. He quoted an informal survey which showed that if an investor entered through the debt fund route, the average tenure was about 12 years. However, if they entered through equity funds, often around market peaks, the tenure shrank to around five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He stressed that managing investor impulse remained challenging due to the overwhelming volume of information. Investors tended to stay only if they endured and \u201csaw at least one cycle\u201d. The biggest risk arose from expectation mismanagement or from entering the market driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), which often resulted in an initial setback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Addressing the rise of easy transactions and \u2018finfluencers\u2019, which contributed to high F&O (Futures & Options) losses, Sachdeva presented a pragmatic view: \u201cIt was necessary to experience a setback, dhakka khana zaroori hai<\/em>.\u201d He argued by stating that experiencing an early loss, which he did during his own college years, could prevent greater future mistakes. This was crucial and analogous to market crashes like the dot-com bust, which would clean up the ecosystem for more measured growth and come back up through other ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tuition Fee Mentality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dispelling conventional wisdom, Sachdeva confirmed that wealthy individuals consistently sought financial advice, viewing it as a \u201ctuition fee\u201d. Whether they were private limited companies, family offices, or high net worth individuals (HNIs), these recognize the value of paying to understand what was happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Alternate Space: Beyond Mutual Funds<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The shift in investor mindset from scarcity, focusing on fixed deposits, gold, and fixed assets, to the mindset of abundance has fueled the growth of alternative investments (AIFs). An abundance mindset created \u201cpatient and persistent capital,\u201d allowing investors to pursue higher risk\/higher return ideas, hedging and concentrated portfolios, Sachdeva told Law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sachdeva defined alternatives simply as \u201cWhatever mutual funds couldn\u2019t do was alternatives.\u201d The Alternative space is segmented into three key buckets:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Yield: Focused on private credit, long-short and debt plus return, with an appropriate level of risk,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Alpha: Focused on absolute returns through private equity and long-only equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Solutions: Focused on multi-asset funds, multi-geography, multi-currency, etc, which are just beginning to gain traction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thresholds and the Future of AIFs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Despite the excitement around them, Sachdeva cautioned that AIFs were not for everyone. He emphasized that mutual funds remain the fundamental means to grow wealth. In fact, 52% of the assets of all family offices in their initial stages were invested in mutual funds. Only after necessities were covered and an investor possessed abundant and patient capital should they consider alternatives, typically once their overall corpus reached around \u20b915\u201320 crore, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Sachdeva, the Alternatives industry was set to grow from \u20b918.5 trillion to \u20b925 trillion in five years. In India, AIFs started in 2012 and were already a \u20b913 lakh crore industry. However, for the sector to truly take off, it requires institutional participation, he pointed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikaas Sachdeva\u2019s perspective provides a clear roadmap of the Indian investment sector\u2019s remarkable transformation \u2013 from the humble beginnings of mutual funds to the rapid rise of alternative investments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With transparency and purpose at the core, Sachdeva highlighted how both investors and entrepreneurs could drive sustainable wealth creation, reflecting India\u2019s ambition to become a self-reliant economic powerhouse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vikaas M Sachdeva, Co-Chair of the IVCA CAT III Council, joined Vivek Law on the Simple Hai! show to discuss the evolution of Indian investment. The transformative journey of the Indian investment sector, the rise of mutual funds and the explosive growth of alternative investments \u2013 these formed the crux of the conversation between Vikaas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesimplehaishow.com\/thesimplehaishow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}