What is your investment brand?

Are you a branded equity investor? If yes, then what brand are you? Are you puzzled by the question? Let me explain. A lot of investors adopt a brand, as in, "I'm a small-cap investor", "I'm a large-cap investor," or even I invest only in this or that sector or worst of all, "I'm an F&O trader".

This question I'm asking you is a counterpart to the one I get about Value Research Stock Advisor: What kind of stocks do we recommend? Small-caps or large-caps or which sector or whatever. My normal answer to this question is that we recommend stocks that will make money for you. It sounds like a smart aleck answer, but as our longstanding members know very well, it's the literal truth.

Still, that does not mean that our members can't choose and adopt a brand. That means that the answer is both yes and no. This question is the same as whether we recommend entire portfolios or just a set of individual, unrelated stocks.

So what is a portfolio? A portfolio is a leather bag, a type of briefcase. No, seriously, that's true. The original meaning of the word is simply a bag designed to carry documents in. It became associated with investments because, in the early twentieth century, stockbrokers would keep each client's share certificates in a separate portfolio. From there, the word gradually came to mean any collection of documents. In finance, it specifically came to mean the investments held by an investor.

That's the broad meaning. However, in investing, 'portfolio' is used with many slightly different meanings. It could simply mean all the investments you have - your complete asset base. It could mean one specific type of asset class, as in your mutual funds being a funds portfolio and your stocks being your equity portfolio. That's a split by what is in the portfolio. It could also be by a goal, as in your retirement portfolio or your children's education portfolio. Or, as in the present discussion, it could mean a particular type of stock like large-cap stocks, small-cap stocks, dividend stocks, value stocks, or anything else.

In the past, we've typically advocated for goal-based portfolios when it comes to mutual funds, given our ability to tailor specific fund types to various objectives. However, dealing with stocks is an entirely different proposition. Unlike mutual funds, which are managed with investment goals in mind, companies operate based on their business objectives, making the assembly of a stock portfolio a distinctively different process. The ultimate aim remains unchanged - to meet your personal financial aspirations. However, the approach tends to be more intricate, given the inherent complexities of these investments.

The question is, does Value Research Stock Advisor do this for you, and the answer is that it depends on you! When we began the service, our stock list was relatively undifferentiated. The number of stocks was small compared to today - just 10 - and creating subsections was a little pointless. The focus was entirely on choosing good investments, and they were likely to stay that way for years to come. Of course, I say 'relatively undifferentiated' because, as our long-time members would recall, we always had the concept of 'All Weather' stocks, even in the beginning. The name is self-explanatory, as is the role such stocks would play in a portfolio. Hence, even back then, despite the fact that the group of 10 stocks didn't constitute a portfolio, our members could use the 'All Weather' tag as a guide to adjust their stock investments in line with their preferences.

From that point, almost six years ago, our recommendation list has grown to as many as 57 stocks. However, the set is larger, so more differentiated now, and there are two that we classify as such: Best Buys Now and All Weather. I prefer simplicity, and as such, the labels are pretty straightforward. While there may be subtleties in how we define these terms, interpreting them based on their plain, literal meaning won't lead you astray.

However, these are only the readymade sets we offer. These are the thalis, but you can also dine a la carte. Within the set of 57 stocks, we have a full range of capitalisations, with the largest company at Rs 12 lakh crore and the smallest at 1/830th of that. We have 42 industries across 15 sectors. We have stocks with all kinds of ownership patterns.

What's more, we have a full range of research and analysis tools to help you do this. It would not be an exaggeration to say that using the tools we have bundled into Value Research Stock Advisor, you can build a parallel set of recommendations, provided you exercise your judgement and your experience about stock investing. If you are still making that, we have our set thali ready to be served to you!

That's available for a reasonable price, as part of all this:

• Access to all our stock picks
• Best Buy Stocks: Selected stocks from our recommendations. Use this set to start building your portfolio right away!
• The complete investment thesis for all recommended stocks so that you understand why you are investing
  
• New recommendations as soon as they are released
• Continuous updates and analysis on all recommended stocks straight from our dedicated analyst team
• Tools and data to research and analyse any other stock

To start immediately, head over to Value Research Stock Advisor, read the details and become a member. You can take the one-year membership or get a 33 per cent discount for three years. Either way, it's a great deal.