Swati Khemani's Advice to Investors on Rediff Podcast:
'Portfolios built in these phases often deliver the strongest outcomes over time.'
'Don't just continue, increase your SIP if you can. India's structural story -- demographics, manufacturing renaissance, government policy -- hasn't changed. The fear has arrived. The fundamentals haven't left.'
She walked into a business family's drawing room in Jaipur, alone, armed with two decades of market intelligence and a track record built through recessions, a pandemic, and geopolitical firestorms. The patriarch kept glancing at the door. Surely someone else was coming -- a man, perhaps. A senior colleague. Somebody more... expected.
Swati Khemani let the silence settle, then said quietly: "It's me only." By the time she left, he wanted her to meet his daughter.
That moment captures something essential about Swati Khemani -- Founder and CEO of Carnelian Asset Management Advisors, a firm that today manages over Rs 15,000 crore in assets, built from scratch, through COVID, through doubt, and through a financial world that wasn't always sure what to make of her.
Key Points
- Stay in your SIP, no matter what: Swati Khemani says SIP investors who stay put through drawdowns are the ones who ultimately capture the biggest gains -- volatility is a feature, not a flaw, of long-term equity investing.
- This is a statistically better entry point than 12 months ago: With mid and small caps down 20%-35% from peaks and valuations now fairly priced, Khemani believes investors who deploy capital now, in tranches, stand to benefit significantly over a 3-5 year horizon.
- Fear is not in the fundamentals -- it's in the headlines: Khemani draws a sharp distinction between sentiment-driven crashes and structural economic deterioration, arguing India's foundations remain intact despite geopolitical turbulence.
- Pharma, CDMO, automobiles and manufacturing remain high-conviction bets: Carnelian has not materially reshuffled its portfolio through the current crisis, adding selectively in banks and auto where risk-reward looks "screamingly attractive."
- Women are natural investors -- they just need to start: Khemani argues that patience, emotional discipline and household financial management are skills women already possess; the only missing ingredient is the confidence to begin, even with Rs 500 a month.
In a wide-ranging, deeply personal conversation on the Rediff Podcast, Khemani traces her journey from a freshly minted chartered accountant -- and the very first CA to join Edelweiss -- joining a 20-person in 2002, to launching India's first dedicated manufacturing fund at the height of pandemic panic in 2020 -- when even the promoters of manufacturing companies told her the thesis was wrong.
She was right. The fund has returned over 30% in six years.
For retail investors watching their portfolios bleed red these days, Khemani's message is unambiguous and urgent: this is not the time to fear, this is the time to act.
With FIIs pulling out over Rs 1 lakh crore, the rupee under pressure, and geopolitical storms brewing from the Gulf to Washington, she sees not a crisis but a vintage -- the kind of entry point that, five years from now, investors will wish they had seized.
Advice to SIP investors: Don't just continue, increase if you can. India's structural story -- demographics, manufacturing renaissance, government policy -- hasn't changed. The fear has arrived. The fundamentals haven't left.
Her career story is just as instructive as her market calls. She quit a decade-long Edelweiss career overnight -- the morning after her mother told her there are things only a mother can give a child. She didn't look back. She spent years angel investing, running a senior hiring consultancy, staying quietly connected to the world she'd stepped away from. And then, with her co-founders Vikas (Khemani) and Manoj (Bahety), she took the entrepreneurial plunge she'd always known was inevitable.
What drives her isn't wealth in the material sense. "To me, it's about creating impact," she says. "Wealth well used."
That philosophy -- patient, purposeful, unintimidated -- is the through-line of everything she's built.
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