Jaydeep Kashikar is regarded as one of the smartest advisors in the business across the country, and is among the most successful IFAs in India. He is a man of strong convictions, and has a great ability to transmit his conviction effectively to his clients, and into client portfolios, which enables him to deliver fantastic wealth creation to them. It is this skill that has helped him succeed in an initiative that most advisors want to execute but few are able to : he has actually managed to get every single one of the 200+ families that he advises, to appreciate that equity funds are a better investment opportunity than property, and the manner in which he accomplished this is so telling that his clients are now busy selling property investments to re-allocate towards equity funds. Jaydeep shares with us on Wealth Forum, for the benefit of the entire advisory fraternity across the country, not only the manner in which he convinced his clients, but also the entire verbatim transcript of the proceedings of the event where he achieved this commendable feat. Read on to understand how an ace advisor thought differently, executed brilliantly, and use his insights and research which he has made available to you, to help your clients understand why they must prefer equity funds over property and gold for wealth creation.

Friends,

As financial advisors, one of our biggest challenges is to convince our clients that long term equity fund investment is superior to property investment. We know the numbers, but our clients have their strong perceptions, and also have their own experiences, which strengthens their conviction in property. At BrainPoint, we have been able to successfully break this myth among our clients. I am writing this note to you on Wealth Forum, to share our experience with you, in the hope that it can help you do likewise with your clients, if you are facing the same challenge.

At BrainPoint, we have an established practice of hosting 2 investor meets each year - in April and in October, where we invite all the 200+ families who have retained us as their fee based advisors. In each of these meets, we present details of our performance, give a market overview, take up one educational / informative topic for detailed discussion which is relevant to our clients, and then open up for a Q&A, where any of our clients can ask us any question, in front of all our clients. This showcases to our clients very clearly our transparent approach, and our confidence in the advice and service we offer to all our clients.

Last October, at the end of our investor meet, one of our clients came up to me and said, "Jaydeep, in the really long term, don't you think property gives much better returns than equity? My house that I bought in the late 1970s, is now up more than 200 times." I instinctively replied, "Bas? Only 200x?" We know all the numbers like the back of our hands, but clients don't readily relate to them. We know that the Sensex itself from 1979 to today has moved from 100 to 27,000 - which is 270x in the same period that my client talked about a 200x appreciation. She was startled with my remark, which I had to then explain with facts and figures.

That conversation set me thinking that for the next investor meet, we must tackle this issue of property vs equity funds, in an effective manner. We decided that the best way is to showcase to our clients using their own experiences and their own data. We sent out an email to all our clients asking them to share with us details of property they had bought at least 10 years ago, to enable us to work out for them their personalised comparative performance of property vs equity funds. Almost half our clients wrote back to us with their property investment details. We worked out comparative performance of their property vs performance of equity funds in the same period (we took an average across all diversified equity funds, large cap funds and mid cap funds). In every single case, we were able to demonstrate to them that equity funds would have vastly outperformed their own property investments - which they believed were excellent investment decisions.

On April 11, 2015, we hosted our investor meet, where the theme was property vs equity funds vs gold. We put in considerable effort to showcase hard data over various time periods and made a detailed presentation. I am appending the entire transcript of the session that we conducted, to enable you to get a first hand feel of not only the numbers but also the way we tried to explain to our clients.

When we came to the session where we showcased real life property vs equity funds performance, based on actual property experiences of our clients, the impact was immediate. When all our clients understood that in not even a single instance, our clients' property investments over a 10 year + horizon outperformed equity funds, the message was driven home clearly and strongly. We showcased similar numbers for investment in gold vs investment in equity funds, and the conclusions were the same : equity funds vastly outperformed gold.

Its less than a month since we did this investor meet, but I already have 5 clients who have either sold their properties or are in the process of doing so, with an intention to switch to equity funds.

You are welcome to go through the detailed transcript of what transpired in this meet, and you are welcome to pick up any ideas and data that you think can help you convince your clients who are overweight in property investments, to re-allocate a portion to equity funds.

Happy advising!

Jaydeep Kashikar

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