AMC Background

SIMPL is a PMS firm incorporated in 2007, with a long operating history anchored in fundamental, value-oriented equity investing. The firm is promoted by Rajashekar Iyer, a Chartered Accountant with over three decades of experience across equity research, advisory, and institutional broking, including senior leadership roles at Kotak Securities where he served as Head of Research and later led the institutional broking franchise.

Ravi Purohit, the Principal Officer and Chief Investment Officer, has been part of the core SiMPL team since 2008 and brings a background spanning engineering, management, and macro-economic research, including prior experience at the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The broader investment team, comprising long-tenured fund managers and analysts, has largely been stable over time, with key members such as Nikhil Upadhyay and Viraj Kacharia associated with the firm for over a decade. This stability has enabled institutional memory, consistency in decision-making, and iterative refinement of the investment process rather than frequent stylistic shifts.

Investment Philosophy

SiMPL follows a ‘true-to-label’ value investing philosophy rooted in classical Graham and Dodd principles and influenced by Buffett-style thinking. The firm’s approach is valuation-led at both entry and exit, with purchase price viewed as the primary margin of safety and the most critical determinant of long-term returns. Investment decisions are driven by bottom-up fundamental research rather than macro forecasts or short-term market views, and portfolios are constructed with an explicit intention to hold businesses through full value realisation cycles.

The investment universe is filtered to identify companies with predictable business models, sustainable competitive advantages, transparent and ethical management teams, and a demonstrated ability to generate consistent profits and cash flows. In the small-cap strategy, additional emphasis is placed on execution quality, balance sheet resilience, and evidence of scalable economics, with profitability thresholds and return-on-equity metrics used as gating criteria to reduce the risk of speculative or structurally weak businesses. Across strategies, management quality and capital allocation discipline are treated as non-negotiable attributes.

Portfolio Construction and Holding Discipline

Portfolios are built gradually and deliberately, often taking several months to reach target deployment levels, reflecting the firm’s willingness to hold cash when valuations do not offer adequate risk-reward. The Multi Cap Value Portfolio typically holds 20–25 stocks, while the Small Cap Value Portfolio is constructed with a broader basket of approximately 30–35 names to mitigate liquidity and volatility risks inherent in smaller companies. Position sizing is driven by a combination of business risk, balance sheet strength, liquidity considerations, and conviction, rather than index weights or sectoral allocations.

The intended holding period at the time of investment is generally three to five years, though actual holding durations may extend if business fundamentals continue to strengthen and valuations remain reasonable. Exits are triggered not by price movements alone, but by either a breakdown in the original investment thesis or valuations running materially ahead of business performance, thereby skewing the risk-reward unfavourably. This discipline applies symmetrically in both rising and falling markets.

Risk Management and Capital Preservation

Risk management at SiMPL is embedded primarily at the stock selection and valuation stages rather than through portfolio-level hedging or tactical asset allocation. The firm explicitly acknowledges that market volatility and liquidity risk, particularly in small-cap stocks, cannot be eliminated but can be moderated through conservative position sizing, diversification, and insisting on a margin of safety at entry. The absence of leverage and derivatives, along with a willingness to remain under-invested during frothy market phases, forms a core part of the firm’s capital preservation framework.

Overall, SiMPL’s investment philosophy prioritises the ability to protect capital and compound wealth steadily over long periods, even at the cost of short-term underperformance. The process is designed for investors who value consistency of approach, discipline across cycles, and a research-intensive framework that seeks to balance return generation with the psychological and financial comfort of enduring drawdowns inherent in equity investing.