Smallcase

Pure-equity strategies can deliver strong long-term returns, but they come with a trade-off: since the entire portfolio sits in stocks, it takes the full hit of any equity market downturn. This risk gets amplified further when the underlying strategy leans into the mid and smallcap space, which is inherently more volatile than the broader market. HNI Prime – Growth at a Fair Price Asset Allocation is built to manage this trade-off.

With over 5 million registered users and more than 1 million monthly active users, StockEdge has long been one of India’s leading stock research and analysis platforms, helping millions of investors discover opportunities through research, stock screening, charting tools, trading strategies and educational content. As the platform matured, StockEdge identified an opportunity to extend its value proposition.

If you’ve seen headlines about an Indian IT company called Persistent Systems buying a German firm called Nagarro for $1.3 billion, and your eyes glazed over at words like “EBITDA” and “voluntary public takeover”, this is for you. Here’s the short version: a mid-sized Indian tech company just made a bold, high-stakes bet to jump into the big leagues.

June was a month of contrasts. Large caps barely moved while small and micro caps rallied hard. The RBI stayed on hold but rolled out a wave of measures to shore up the rupee. Oil went from crisis to calm and back to uneasy within four weeks. And two sectors, defence and data centres, had breakout months that had little to do with the geopolitical noise dominating headlines.

As HCL Group celebrates its 50th anniversary, the milestone represents more than a victory lap for one of India’s most enduring tech titans. According to CEO C. Vijayakumar, the industry is currently weathering its “biggest inflection point yet,” a shift so profound that the next half-century of innovation essentially begins today. However, this new frontier is opening against a backdrop of intense market volatility.

Pidilite’s FY26 was defined by a trend that doesn’t often appear in mature consumer businesses: growth and margin expansion moving in the same direction. Standalone revenue grew close to 12% for the year, and almost all of that came from volumes rather than price increases. That growth held up across both the consumer-facing Consumer & Bazaar business and the more industrial B2B segment, with both posting similar low-double-digit volume gains. None of this came at the cost of profitability either.

Every company has a year it would rather not repeat, and for Granules India, that year was the one just before this. A US FDA warning letter at its Gagillapur facility, elevated remediation costs, and the discipline of rebuilding investor trust meant FY25 was about survival and correction. FY26, reported at the company’s April 29 earnings call, is the year that the correction started showing up in the numbers — and the months since have added a few more data points worth tying back to that story.

Quantitative investing is having a moment in India. For years, quant strategies remained locked behind institutional walls, including Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs), Portfolio Management Services (PMS) houses, high-ticket sizes, and platforms built for professionals. Retail investors, meanwhile, stayed with what they knew: mutual funds, direct equity, and eventually index funds. That’s changing quickly now. Let’s take a look at the rise of quant investing in India.

First, the scorecard Lupin closed out FY26 (the year ended March 2026) with genuinely standout numbers. Full-year revenue came in at ₹27,488 crore, up almost 24% over FY25, while EBITDA jumped 55% to ₹8,160 crore — a margin of 29.7%, nearly 600 basis points higher than the year before. Profit after tax rose 62% to ₹5,355 crore. For the fourth quarter alone, sales grew 33% YoY to ₹7,392 crore and EBITDA nearly doubled, up 68%.

In October 2024, smallcap investors were sitting on 120% gains. By June 2026, most of those gains were gone. The Nifty Smallcap 100 had fallen 2.7% over a brutal 630-day stretch, and the funds built around quality and momentum, the strategies investors trust most, fell even harder. One portfolio, built on those same factors, should have fallen with them. Instead, it held at -0.7%.