AMC View

There are clear points of appeal for what True Beacon is trying to build. A very strong first year, differentiated strategies and a disruptive pricing model are all positives. However, they are still a very young AMC and a lack of publicly available longer-term performance of the founders long-short strategies do not allow for a more aggressive 5-star rating.

AMC Pedigree

It is a bit difficult to give a clear view of the pedigree of True Beacon, given a number of strong positives and negatives at play. In terms of positives, the track record of the founding team in establishing India's leading low-cost brokerage gives the AMC a high degree of founder credibility. A great first year of strategy outperformance also adds to the appeal. On the flip side, while their brokerage credentials are strong, their AMC credentials are still relatively new. A lack of a publicly available historic investment track record of the Kamath brothers makes it difficult to judge the relevance of longer-term credentials.

Team Pedigree

The Kamath brothers have a very high degree of credibility, in terms of the scaling of Zerodha. However, managing a brokerage and managing an investment fund require very different skill sets. While they do have experience managing private wealth in Alternative strategies, a lack of publicly available information on longer-term performance, makes it difficult to judge pedigree as fund managers.

Investment Philosophy

True Beacon seeks to launch differentiated investment strategies, that rare combination of traditional long-only strategies and more sophisticated long-short strategies. These have a clear value in terms of differentiated risk-returns, even as conceptually some of these strategies can be considered similar to a dynamic asset allocation fund. The ability to outperform long-short strategies consistently needs to be tested over a longer period to truly understand the value of these strategies.