smallcase turns 1
🎉 A year older, a year wiser
1 year ago today, we launched smallcase. 250 market days and 600,000+ stock orders later, here’s taking a quick look back at how we started & what we have been able to achieve.
We built smallcase as a new, simplified way to invest in stocks. Till then, most individual investors could only take direct equity exposure by either buying single stocks or investing in mutual funds, each being at the extreme ends of a spectrum.
smallcases are a new type of instrument, a middle ground to both, with the liquidity of stocks & the portfolio-based exposure of mutual funds. Almost like an ETF — with the added advantage of being open & flexible.
A smallcase is a portfolio of stocks that reflects a certain idea, theme or strategy. For example, zero-debt companies, GST, rising rural demand, banking sector. We currently have over 60 smallcases, spanning across thematic, model-based, sectoral & holdings-based strategies.
Buying, tracking & managing a portfolio of stocks was always a cumbersome & broken process that spanned across multiple portals — we have made it seamless on one platform, and only charge a nominal added flat convenience fee of Rs. 100 whenever you buy a smallcase.
While this enables you to manage your investments in multiple portfolios easily, it also eliminates the % expense ratios in favour of flat fees; hence making smallcase as an instrument a cost-effective & understandable alternative to mutual funds.
We have been immensely lucky to see the concept get validated & play out in the last year.
A substantial number of smallcase investors have invested in stocks for the first time (only had equity exposure via mutual funds earlier), also most of them only hold smallcase stocks in their demat accounts.
Let’s also take a quick look at how our smallcases have fared. Since we launched last July — average returns across all our smallcases have been 36.46% (compared to Nifty’s 13.56%, and equity mutual funds’ 19.23%)
In addition, smallcases currently held by our users are averaging a total return of 11.26%. This does depend on the choice of smallcases as well, since we don’t suggest or recommend smallcases.
On the product end as well, we’ve grown quite a lot. What started as an easy portal for convenient portfolio investing is steadily evolving into a platform where one can invest in readymade smallcases, create/customize their own (10,000+ custom smallcases already) and with our latest product — screener, screen the stock universe to find the right stocks to add to their portfolio.
We’re going beyond being just a portfolio transaction platform and are building a new ecosystem revolving around smallcases. There are even bigger things happening on the product/smallcases front — we will unveil them when they’re ready (starting with the much awaited SIP feature and the full-fledged mobile investing app this month)
We want to say a huge thanks to all folks who use smallcase and our platform partners: the teams at Zerodha, Thomson Reuters & Timeless for all the feedback, criticism, support and love. Keep ’em coming!
Here’s to an amazing year #2, can’t wait to see what will be cause for celebration next year.
Note: To celebrate our first anniversary, we are waiving off smallcase fees for all Buys tomorrow (14 July 2017). Happy investing!Shameless plug — we are looking to add smart talent to our team across Engineering, Product, Growth & Research roles. Apply here.
