Aaryam Mathur had a portfolio but he didn't have a clue

Aaryam Mathur thought he was clever. And for a while, we let him believe it. A couple of index funds, some "blue-chip" stocks (God, that term), and a few buzzy IPOs that made it into every WhatsApp investing group last year. He called it his "core and satellite" strategy, like he was building ISRO 2.0 from his drawing room in Worli. In reality? It was a mess. A well-dressed, overconfident, spectacularly concentrated mess. The shock came not from a market crash, but something far more humiliating—a Sunday afternoon spent actually checking his portfolio. For the first time in ages, he pulled up the Value Research Portfolio tool and entered every fund, every stock, every last little punt he'd forgotten to delete from his trading app. And the diagnosis? A big, ugly, entirely self-inflicted case of tech bloat. Seventy per cent of his portfolio was in technology. That's not exposure. That's addiction. He hadn't noticed. None of them ever do. The bros who say things like, "I'm into long-term wealth creation," and then go all-in on whatever Sequoia is pushing this quarter. He thought he was diversified because the logos wer

This article was originally published on May 19, 2025.