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MethodologyMost risk profilers are a black box. Ours isn't. Here is exactly what the twelve questions measure, what counts for more, and the two answers that can override everything else you told us.
Investors don't underperform because they picked the wrong fund. They underperform because they sold at the wrong moment.
The gap between what a fund returns and what its investors actually earn is well documented, and it is made almost entirely of decisions taken in bad months. Someone who holds a modest equity allocation for fifteen years ends up ahead of someone who held an aggressive one for three years and then capitulated.
So this profiler is not really trying to measure how much risk you can take. It is trying to estimate how much you will still be holding after a bad year. Those are different numbers, and the second one is the useful one.
That single conviction explains every weighting decision below.
Every question feeds one of four buckets. A high score in one doesn't rescue a low score in another — that's the point.
We describe a portfolio falling from ₹10 lakh to ₹8 lakh and ask what you'd actually do. We ask which of two portfolios you'd rather hold for a decade. And we ask whether you've already lived through a serious market fall, and what you did then.
This bucket carries more weight than any other, and the drawdown question alone is weighted four times as heavily as the question about how well you understand mutual funds. Deliberately.
Your time horizon, and what the money is actually for. Retirement in 2045 tolerates a great deal of volatility. A house deposit in 2028 tolerates almost none, no matter how relaxed you are about risk.
This is the second-heaviest input, because it is the one constraint that isn't negotiable. Markets don't consult your timeline.
Emergency fund, income stability, and who depends on you. This is capacity rather than temperament — it's the difference between wanting to hold through a fall and being able to.
Someone with no emergency fund doesn't really have an equity portfolio. They have an emergency fund that happens to be invested in equity, and it will be sold at the worst possible time.
Your prior investing experience and your self-rated understanding of mutual funds. Both count, but they count least.
Knowledge is a poor predictor of behaviour. Plenty of people who can explain exactly why you shouldn't sell in a crash still sell in a crash. We'd rather weight what you've done than what you know.
A weighted average has a flaw: it lets a strong score in ten places quietly cancel out a disqualifying answer in one. We don't allow that. Two answers act as hard ceilings regardless of everything else.
If you tell us you need this money within a couple of years, we cap your allocation at the most conservative profile even if you scored at the top of the scale. Money with a near-term deadline should not sit in equity, however comfortable you are with volatility.
You may find this frustrating if you consider yourself an aggressive investor. It is still the right answer. The market has no interest in when your daughter's admission fee is due.
If you answer that you'd sell everything in a sharp fall, we cap your equity allocation substantially — even if your horizon is long, your income is stable and you scored well everywhere else.
We take that answer seriously rather than averaging it away. An allocation you actually keep will beat a higher one you abandon at the bottom. If you think you were harsher on yourself than reality warrants, say so on the call and we'll talk it through — that conversation is more useful than a number.
Your answers produce a score, which places you in one of five profiles — from Capital Preservation through to High Growth — each with an indicative split across equity, debt and gold. You also get an illustration of what a monthly investment could grow into over different holding periods.
Every one of those can change the answer materially. That is precisely why the profile is where the conversation starts rather than where it ends, and why we'd rather talk to you than hand you a number and disappear.
Nobody truly knows how they'll react to a 30% fall until they're in one. Answering a question calmly at your desk is not the same as watching your savings drop over a fortnight. We weight your past behaviour above your predicted behaviour for exactly this reason.
A job change, a child, a parent's illness, a windfall — any of these can move you a band or two. A profile taken once and never revisited becomes wrong quietly. It's worth retaking every couple of years, or after anything significant.
You could work out which answers produce an aggressive allocation and pick those. Nothing stops you. But the only person you'd be misleading is yourself, and the bill arrives in the next bad quarter rather than today.
It's a structured way to begin. A plan involves your full balance sheet, your goals with actual numbers attached, and trade-offs between them. That takes a conversation, and it's the part we're actually useful for.
Three minutes, twelve questions, and a profile you can argue with. Answering honestly is more useful than answering well.
