The Missing Middle of the Portfolio

Why a 70% mutual-fund core and a 30% direct-equity sleeve can become a search for India’s next generation of market leaders

A 70:30 allocation between equity mutual funds and direct stocks can be more than a compromise between passive diversification and active stock-picking. Properly constructed, it creates two complementary portfolios: the mutual-fund component owns much of corporate India that is already discovered, institutionalised and widely researched; the direct component searches for businesses that are still becoming visible. This distinction becomes particularly important when the direct sleeve moves beyond the familiar large and midcap universe and concentrates on companies roughly in the next 250–550/600 by market capitalisation. But this is not a licence to buy everything small. Mutual funds themselves increasingly penetrate the smallcap universe, valuations can become euphoric, liquidity can disappear precisely when needed, and the best-looking growth story can still be attached to mediocre capital allocation. The real objective is therefore not “smallcap exposure” but early ownership of emerging leaders.


The portfolio is really two different machines

The conventional description of a 70% mutual-fund/30% direct-stock portfolio is deceptively simple.

It sounds like an allocation decision.

It is actually a division of labour.

The mutual-fund component is designed to capture the broad compounding of Indian corporate earnings without requiring the investor to identify every winner. The direct-equity component exists for a different reason: to exploit situations where an investor believes a particular business can grow much faster than the market currently anticipates.

That distinction matters because mutual funds already perform several functions exceptionally well.

AMFI describes professional management and diversification as two of the principal advantages of mutual funds. SEBI similarly notes that mutual-fund schemes are required, subject to specified exceptions, to maintain diversified portfolios. (AMFI India)

As Sankaran Naren put it in a recent discussion, equity funds are meant to remain invested through valuation cycles rather than attempt to jump in and out of the market. (Mumbai Mirror)

The implication is subtle.

The 70% does not need to be clever.

It needs to be reliable.

The 30%, on the other hand, has to justify its existence.

If it merely duplicates the mutual funds, the investor has paid for two versions of the same decision.


The overlap problem: owning the same India twice

Suppose the mutual-fund portfolio already has meaningful exposure to the country's major banks, industrial companies, technology businesses, consumer franchises and pharmaceutical leaders.

Buying those same companies directly can create the illusion of diversification while actually increasing concentration.

The investor may believe:

70% professionally managed + 30% personally selected.

Economically, it could be:

70% professionally selected + 30% overweighting the professional managers' favourite stocks.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A particularly high-conviction direct position can be rational.

But it should be deliberate.

The direct sleeve should therefore ask a different question from the mutual funds.

The mutual fund asks:

Which businesses deserve to be owned?

The direct investor can ask:

Which businesses are not yet sufficiently important to be widely owned—but could become important?

That is a considerably more interesting question.


Why the 250–550/600 universe becomes attractive

There is an important technical qualification.

Under SEBI's classification, small-cap companies are those ranked 251st onward by full market capitalisation. Small-cap funds must invest at least 65% of assets in such companies. (Canara Robeco)

That means the proposed hunting ground is not untouched territory.

It is already being explored aggressively by professional investors.

The Nifty Smallcap 250 represents ranks 251–500 in the Nifty 500 framework, while the broader SEBI small-cap universe extends beyond that. The practical hunting ground therefore becomes something like 250–550/600, rather than an artificially precise index boundary.

And this is where one of the central contradictions appears.

The investor wants to exploit an area where institutional research is weaker.

But institutional money is increasingly moving into exactly that area.

Small-cap mutual funds have become enormous. Recent data show the category with roughly ₹4.3 lakh crore of assets, while some individual funds have tens of thousands of crores under management. (INDmoney)

Nippon India Small Cap alone, for example, was reported at roughly ₹78,000 crore of AUM in early August 2026. (INDmoney)

The smallcap forest is therefore no longer undiscovered.

It is simply less completely explored.

That distinction is crucial.


The professional investor's paradox

There is an amusing irony here.

The original argument for the direct-stock sleeve is that mutual funds will already have discovered most of the attractive large and midcap companies.

So the investor moves downward.

Only to discover that the mutual-fund industry has followed.

And it has arrived with several thousand analysts, databases, management meetings and rather large cheques.

The result is that the direct investor's edge cannot simply be:

“I own smallcaps.”

That is not an edge.

The edge must be better selection, earlier recognition, or superior patience.

Vijay Kedia's famous SMILE framework captures one version of this idea: look for businesses that are Small in size, Medium in experience, Large in aspiration and Extra-large in market potential. (The Financial Express)

That is much closer to the appropriate philosophy.

The objective is not to discover obscure companies.

It is to discover companies before their eventual scale becomes obvious.


The real target: rank migration

This changes the investment question completely.

A conventional smallcap investor might ask:

Is this a good ₹10,000-crore company?

The emerging-leader investor asks:

Can this become a ₹30,000-crore company?

Or:

Can this ₹7,000-crore company become a ₹50,000-crore company over ten years?

That is the source of the asymmetry.

Consider a hypothetical ₹7,000-crore company that eventually becomes ₹70,000 crore.

That is a tenfold increase.

A large company already worth ₹3 lakh crore would need to add ₹27 lakh crore to produce the same percentage return.

This is the mathematical reason smaller companies can offer greater compounding potential: the denominator is smaller.

But the same mathematics works in reverse.

A company can fall from ₹7,000 crore to ₹2,500 crore much more easily than a ₹3 lakh crore company can collapse to ₹1 lakh crore.

Smallness is therefore an opportunity and a risk factor.


Why the 30% sleeve should not simply become a small-cap fund

This is perhaps the most important contradiction in the entire thesis.

If the investor uses the 30% direct sleeve to buy 25–30 smallcaps, he may inadvertently recreate a small-cap mutual fund—except without a fund manager, research department, compliance infrastructure or risk committee.

That is not necessarily an upgrade.

SEBI explicitly warns that direct equity involves risks including limited diversification, emotional decision-making and absence of professional guidance. (Securities and Exchange Board of India)

The direct sleeve therefore needs to be concentrated but not reckless.

A reasonable architecture could be:

70% — Core mutual funds

Broad-market, flexicap, large-and-midcap and carefully selected mid/smallcap exposure.

22–24% — Emerging leaders

Approximately 10–15 companies primarily from the 250–550/600 market-cap universe.

6–8% — exceptional businesses

Companies already inside the top 250 where the investor has a particularly strong reason to be structurally overweight.

This preserves the principle without turning it into a religious doctrine.


The 40-stock research universe

An earlier research exercise produced a useful universe of approximately 40 candidates.

The point is not that all 40 deserve ownership.

Quite the opposite.

They represent different versions of the emerging-leader thesis.

Precision manufacturing and industrial India

Azad Engineering, Unimech Aerospace & Manufacturing, Data Patterns, DCX Systems, Cyient DLM, Syrma SGS, Apar Industries, Transformers & Rectifiers India, Techno Electric and Anup Engineering represent one of the most compelling clusters.

They capture India's attempt to move from assembly and low-value manufacturing toward precision engineering, electronics, aerospace, defence and sophisticated industrial products.

This is potentially one of the most powerful long-term themes in the universe.

Azad and Unimech are particularly interesting because the thesis is not merely "India will manufacture more." It is that Indian companies can become qualified suppliers embedded in global manufacturing chains.

That is a much higher-quality proposition.

The transition from ₹500 crore of domestic manufacturing revenue to ₹2,000 crore of global high-value manufacturing revenue can fundamentally alter a company's economics.


Electronics: the possibility of a new industrial ecosystem

Syrma SGS, Cyient DLM, Data Patterns and DCX Systems occupy different parts of the electronics ecosystem.

The common theme is localisation.

India is attempting to build capabilities across:

  • electronics manufacturing services
  • aerospace electronics
  • defence electronics
  • systems integration
  • components
  • embedded technology

The attraction is not simply production growth.

It is ecosystem formation.

Once customers qualify a supplier for mission-critical applications, switching costs can become meaningful.

The danger, however, is equally clear.

Contract manufacturing can remain a relatively low-moat business if the supplier does not climb the value chain.

Hence the crucial distinction between:

“India is going to make more electronics.”

and

“This particular company will capture an attractive share of the value created.”

Only the second creates an investment thesis.


Defence: attractive theme, dangerous simplification

Data Patterns, DCX Systems, Zen Technologies, Paras Defence and Apollo Micro Systems illustrate another contradiction.

India's defence indigenisation programme is unquestionably creating opportunities.

But "defence" has become one of the market's favourite words.

That creates a valuation problem.

A company supplying a genuinely proprietary radar component is not economically equivalent to a company assembling equipment under a government order.

The investor therefore has to distinguish between:

order-book growth

and

economic-moat growth.

Zen is interesting because simulation and anti-drone systems can potentially involve intellectual property and proprietary capabilities.

Paras offers specialised optics and defence/space exposure.

Apollo Micro Systems offers mission-critical electronics.

But the higher the market's enthusiasm, the more the investor must ask whether the business is actually becoming better—or merely becoming more expensive.


Railways and infrastructure: secular opportunity, cyclical accounting

Jupiter Wagons and Titagarh Rail Systems belong to another attractive cluster.

India needs more rail freight capacity, railway equipment, metro systems and modern rolling stock.

That creates genuine structural demand.

But infrastructure businesses are notoriously capable of turning excellent narratives into mediocre shareholder returns.

The questions must therefore include:

  • What is the sustainable order book?
  • What is the margin?
  • How much working capital is required?
  • What is the incremental ROCE?
  • Is growth internally funded?
  • Is management disciplined when the cycle turns?

A ₹10,000-crore order book sounds wonderful.

A ₹10,000-crore order book producing 7% EBITDA margins while consuming enormous working capital is considerably less wonderful.

The market occasionally discovers this distinction after buying the shares.

Usually at considerable expense.


Healthcare: perhaps the cleanest long-term hunting ground

Neuland Laboratories, Aarti Pharmalabs, Marksans Pharma, Vijaya Diagnostic Centre and Aster DM Healthcare represent businesses where the growth thesis can be less dependent on government capex cycles.

Neuland is particularly interesting because complex chemistry and API capabilities can create specialised manufacturing advantages.

Vijaya represents another powerful phenomenon: the formalisation of healthcare diagnostics.

Aster represents the long-term expansion of organised hospital infrastructure.

The common thread is demographic rather than merely cyclical.

India's healthcare expenditure should rise as income increases, insurance penetration expands and consumers shift from episodic treatment toward more organised healthcare.

The difficulty is valuation.

Good businesses are not automatically good stocks.

That sentence deserves to be printed on the first page of every smallcap investor's notebook.


Energy transition: enormous opportunity, uncertain economics

Waaree Renewable Technologies, KPI Green Energy, JNK India and Gravita India represent different ways of playing India's energy transition.

But again, the investor needs to separate volume growth from value creation.

Solar capacity can grow exponentially while returns on capital fall.

Renewable EPC can grow rapidly while competition destroys margins.

Equipment manufacturers can expand capacity while overcapacity eventually compresses pricing.

Gravita is interesting for a different reason: recycling is fundamentally a circular-economy business, where resource scarcity, regulation and environmental requirements can reinforce demand.

The energy-transition basket therefore requires much greater attention to capital intensity and competitive structure than the headline growth rates suggest.


Consumer businesses: boring is sometimes beautiful

Safari Industries, Ethos, Senco Gold and Thangamayil Jewellery offer an entirely different proposition.

India's consumption story is not limited to packaged food and smartphones.

It includes:

  • branded luggage
  • luxury goods
  • organised jewellery
  • premiumisation
  • formal retail

Safari is particularly interesting because the luggage industry illustrates how a fragmented market can become increasingly organised.

Ethos offers exposure to India's affluent consumer.

Senco and Thangamayil participate in the enormous migration from unorganised to organised jewellery retail.

These companies lack the glamour of AI, defence or aerospace.

That may actually be useful.

There is a limit to how many times a market can put the word "strategic" before a stock price.


Financialisation: the difficult case

360 ONE WAM, Aavas Financiers and Poonawalla Fincorp illustrate the continuing financialisation of Indian household wealth.

The long-term structural thesis is powerful.

As household incomes rise, financial assets should increasingly replace physical assets as vehicles for wealth accumulation.

But financial businesses have a special problem:

the balance sheet is the product.

A manufacturing company can have a bad quarter.

A lender can have a bad underwriting culture and discover the problem three years later.

That makes asset quality, underwriting discipline, funding structure and provisioning more important than superficial earnings growth.

The financialisation theme therefore deserves representation—but perhaps with smaller individual positions than high-ROCE industrial compounders.


The mutual funds themselves provide an important clue

The direct investor should not assume that professional investors are blind to these opportunities.

They are not.

DSP Small Cap Fund, for example, had meaningful positions in companies including Thangamayil Jewellery, Kirloskar Oil Engines, Lumax Auto Technologies, Sansera Engineering and Welspun Corp as of June 2026. (Business Standard)

That is revealing.

Several companies previously identified as attractive candidates are already inside sophisticated small-cap portfolios.

The investor therefore has to distinguish between:

discovered but under-owned

and

genuinely overlooked.

The first category can still generate excellent returns.

The second potentially offers greater alpha.

But the second is much harder to find.


Small-cap funds are themselves becoming powerful discovery engines

There is another irony.

Small-cap funds have historically been criticised for their volatility.

Yet their sheer scale means they can now provide capital, research attention and institutional validation to companies that previously had little visibility.

Recent data show small-cap funds attracting substantial flows again in 2026 after the valuation correction. (The Economic Times)

One report found that 24 of 34 small-cap schemes with sufficient history had three-year data, while only nine had outperformed the Nifty Smallcap 250 benchmark over that period. (Equity Research India)

That statistic is useful for another reason.

Owning the small-cap category is not the same thing as selecting the best smallcaps.

Fund-manager selection matters.

And the same principle applies to the direct investor.


The case for concentration

A 30% sleeve spread across 30 stocks gives each position only about 1% of the total portfolio.

A ten-bagger then contributes approximately nine percentage points to total portfolio value before considering compounding and other changes.

Interesting—but not transformational.

A 30% sleeve divided among 12 stocks gives an average initial position of 2.5% of the overall portfolio.

A ten-bagger then has a much more meaningful effect.

That is why the direct sleeve should probably contain 10–15 genuine convictions, not 30–40 "interesting ideas."

Forty stocks belong in the research universe.

Twelve belong in the portfolio.

The other 28 should remain happily unemployed.


But concentration creates its own contradiction

The smaller the company, the greater the probability of permanent impairment.

That means the direct portfolio needs a higher standard of due diligence than the mutual-fund portfolio.

SEBI's investor guidance makes the same fundamental point: research is indispensable, diversification matters, and market-wide risk cannot be diversified away. (SEBI Investor)

For a direct smallcap, the checklist should extend beyond financial statements.

The investor needs to investigate:

Management quality

Promoter ownership, capital allocation, related-party transactions, remuneration, pledging and governance history.

Balance sheet

Debt, working capital, contingent liabilities and cash conversion.

Economics

ROCE, incremental ROCE, gross margins and pricing power.

Growth

Whether revenue growth is organic, acquisition-driven or merely cyclical.

Industry structure

Competitors, entry barriers and customer concentration.

Capital allocation

Whether management reinvests intelligently or simply expands because the bank is willing to lend.

Valuation

Whether the future is already embedded in the price.

This is where the direct sleeve becomes work.

There is no shortcut.


The importance of "rank migration"

A useful conceptual framework is to classify companies according to the probability of market-cap migration.

Some companies are likely to remain around rank 300–500 indefinitely.

They may be perfectly good businesses.

But they are not necessarily the target.

The ideal candidate has a credible pathway from:

₹5,000–10,000 crore

to

₹20,000–30,000 crore

to

₹50,000 crore+

over a decade.

That pathway normally requires three things simultaneously:

earnings growth + capital efficiency + valuation sustainability.

If earnings compound at 20%, ROCE remains high and the valuation does not collapse, market capitalisation can rise dramatically.

Conversely, a company growing revenue at 25% but requiring enormous capital expenditure may create far less shareholder value.

This is why ROCE is arguably more important than revenue growth in this exercise.


The valuation paradox

Smallcaps can be simultaneously:

cheap relative to their historical valuations

and

expensive relative to their underlying economics.

There is no contradiction.

A stock falling from 60× earnings to 40× may be "cheaper" while still being expensive.

Conversely, a 30× multiple for a company capable of compounding earnings at 25% for ten years can be perfectly rational.

This is where Jyotivardhan Jaipuria's recent observation is useful: he described smallcaps as a classic "buy pessimism, sell euphoria" trade and expected them to outperform over the following 12–18 months. (Business Standard)

The phrase captures an important principle.

The best smallcap opportunities frequently appear when the narrative has temporarily broken.

The worst opportunities often appear when everyone agrees that the future is enormous.


Why the current environment is neither euphoric nor benign

The 2026 environment presents an unusual mixture.

Smallcaps have undergone a substantial valuation correction from their earlier excesses, and fund managers have increasingly argued that earnings are improving and valuations are becoming more reasonable. (The Economic Times)

At the same time, small-cap funds continue to attract significant investor money.

This creates a delicate balance.

The correction may have removed some excesses.

But capital inflows can recreate them.

The investor therefore should not infer:

"Smallcaps corrected, therefore smallcaps are cheap."

The correct inference is:

"The correction has made the search more interesting; now individual businesses need to be evaluated."

That is a much more defensible proposition.


The 70% is what makes the 30% psychologically possible

This is perhaps the deepest argument for the structure.

If the entire portfolio were concentrated in emerging smallcaps, a 40–50% drawdown could become psychologically intolerable.

The investor might sell precisely when the underlying thesis is beginning to work.

The 70% core changes that equation.

The investor can watch one direct holding fall 40% without believing that the entire financial future has collapsed.

That is an enormous behavioural advantage.

SEBI explicitly emphasises matching investment choice to time horizon and risk tolerance, while noting that equity is inappropriate for short-term needs. (SEBI Investor)

In other words, portfolio construction is not merely about expected return.

It is about creating a structure that the investor can actually hold.


The direct sleeve should have a different sell discipline

The mutual-fund portfolio can tolerate considerable individual-company turnover because the investor has delegated security selection.

The direct portfolio cannot.

A direct holding should normally be sold for one of four reasons:

The thesis has broken.

Growth, competitive advantage or economics have deteriorated.

Management quality has deteriorated.

Governance problems can invalidate even excellent businesses.

Valuation has become irrational.

A wonderful company can become a poor investment.

A materially better opportunity has emerged.

Capital is finite.

This last reason is often overlooked.

A direct portfolio should not become a museum of old ideas.


The most interesting candidates are not necessarily the most exciting

The earlier 40-stock universe can be understood through six broad clusters.

Industrial compounders:
Azad Engineering, Unimech, Apar Industries, Anup Engineering, Techno Electric, Transformers & Rectifiers.

Electronics and defence:
Data Patterns, DCX Systems, Cyient DLM, Syrma SGS, Zen Technologies, Paras Defence, Apollo Micro Systems.

Healthcare:
Neuland Laboratories, Aarti Pharmalabs, Marksans Pharma, Vijaya Diagnostics, Aster DM.

Infrastructure and energy:
Jupiter Wagons, Titagarh Rail Systems, JNK India, Waaree Renewable Technologies, KPI Green Energy, Gravita India.

Consumer:
Safari Industries, Ethos, Senco Gold, Thangamayil Jewellery.

Financialisation and digital:
360 ONE WAM, Aavas Financiers, Poonawalla Fincorp, Newgen Software, RateGain, Latent View, Affle India, Tanla Platforms.

This breadth is important.

The direct portfolio should not become a single-theme bet on defence, manufacturing or renewable energy merely because those themes currently sound impressive.

The best emerging leaders can appear in extraordinarily unglamorous places.


The ultimate selection test

After the first screen, the 40 names should probably be reduced to about 20.

Then perhaps to 12–15.

The decisive questions should be brutally simple:

Can earnings compound at 15–20%+ for many years?

Can ROCE remain above the cost of capital by a meaningful margin?

Does the company possess a genuine competitive advantage?

Is the addressable market large enough?

Can management reinvest capital intelligently?

Is the balance sheet strong enough to survive a bad cycle?

Is the promoter trustworthy?

Is valuation reasonable relative to the growth opportunity?

Is the business still small enough for growth to matter?

And finally:

Could this company plausibly become several times larger without destroying returns on capital?

That final question separates a potential compounder from a merely growing company.


The portfolio architecture that emerges

The most coherent structure therefore looks less like an allocation pie and more like a barbell of responsibility.

The 70% core captures the known.

The 30% direct sleeve searches for the not-yet-known.

Within that 30%, roughly three-quarters can be devoted to emerging companies, with the remainder available for exceptional businesses already in the top 250 where deliberate overweighting makes sense.

The research universe can contain 30–40 names.

The actual portfolio should probably contain 10–15.

Position sizes should reflect conviction and downside risk.

And every direct holding should have a written thesis explaining not merely why the company is good today, but why it could be materially larger five or ten years from now.

That is the difference between investing and collecting stock tickers.


The contradiction at the heart of the strategy

There is, finally, an unavoidable paradox.

The investor wants to discover companies before mutual funds discover them.

But the mutual-fund industry is becoming better at discovering small companies.

The investor wants concentration.

But concentration increases company-specific risk.

The investor wants high growth.

But high growth attracts high valuations.

The investor wants long holding periods.

But small companies can deteriorate surprisingly quickly.

The investor wants a moat.

But some of India's fastest-growing businesses are still operating in industries where the moat has yet to be proven.

And the investor wants to buy the next largecap.

The market knows this.

Which is why the next largecap is usually priced as if it might become the next largecap long before it actually does.

This is why the strategy cannot be reduced to a market-cap screen.

The market-cap rank identifies the hunting ground.

It does not identify the prey.


The deeper investment thesis

The 70:30 structure works because it acknowledges something uncomfortable about modern investing.

Professional fund managers are very good at discovering businesses.

Individual investors are unlikely to beat them consistently by studying the same largecaps with less information and fewer resources.

But individuals have one structural advantage:

they can remain small, patient and unconstrained.

A ₹500-crore position is irrelevant to a large mutual fund.

A ₹5-crore position can be meaningful to an individual.

A fund cannot always wait ten years for a business to mature.

An individual can.

A fund may have liquidity constraints.

An individual does not necessarily have them.

A fund may need to own what is benchmark-relevant.

An individual can own what is merely potentially important.

That is where the 30% direct sleeve can earn its keep.

Not through superior trading.

Not through cleverness.

Not through chasing momentum.

But through patient identification of companies whose future scale is materially larger than the market currently recognises.


Reflection

The strongest argument for a 70:30 portfolio is therefore not that mutual funds are safer and stocks are more exciting. It is that the two components can perform fundamentally different jobs. The mutual funds provide exposure to the India that has already been discovered; the direct portfolio searches for the India that is still emerging. That makes the 250–550/600 market-cap region intellectually attractive—but not automatically profitable. The irony is that the very moment an investor discovers this opportunity, thousands of professional investors are already looking at it. The advantage therefore shifts from discovery alone to judgement: identifying which small companies possess the economics, management quality, capital discipline and addressable market to become much larger businesses. Forty names can make a stimulating watchlist. Twelve serious holdings can make a portfolio. The objective is not to find smallcaps. It is to find tomorrow's largecaps while they are still small enough for growth to matter.

References

  • Securities and Exchange Board of India, Investor Education: Managing Investment Risks. (SEBI Investor)
  • Securities and Exchange Board of India, Understanding Mutual Funds. (SEBI Investor)
  • Securities and Exchange Board of India, Direct Equity and Investment Risks, 2026. (Securities and Exchange Board of India)
  • Association of Mutual Funds in India, Advantages of Investing in Mutual Funds. (AMFI India)
  • Canara Robeco Mutual Fund, Small Cap Fund Factsheet, April 2026. (Canara Robeco)
  • Moneycontrol, Are small-cap funds poised for a revival in FY27?, July 2026. (Moneycontrol)
  • Economic Times, Attractive valuations, improving earnings: Why fund managers are now raising their exposure to small-cap stocks, June 2026. (The Economic Times)
  • Business Standard, Small-caps likely to outperform over 12–18 months: Jyotivardhan Jaipuria, April 2026. (Business Standard)
  • Business Standard, Madhusudan Kela, Vijay Kedia: Smart investor portfolios beat markets in July, July 2026. (Business Standard)
  • Financial Express, Vijay Kedia's SMILE framework and small-cap investing, 2026. (The Financial Express)
  • DSP Mutual Fund, DSP Small Cap Fund portfolio/fund review, June 2026. (Business Standard)
  • Sankaran Naren interview, This is a good time to initiate SIPs—but do not expect post-2020 returns, April 2026. (Mumbai Mirror)

#IndianEquities #SmallCapInvesting #MutualFunds #DirectEquity #LongTermInvesting

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