A researched stock portfolio, every month.
On the 1st, a SEBI-registered Research Analyst’s rules-based model publishes the exact stocks and the exact weights. You place the orders in your own broker — about ten minutes on Zerodha — and hold. We never touch your money.
- One flat monthly fee, never a % of your corpus
- ~10 min a month on Zerodha
- SEBI-registered Research Analyst
Delivery equity and ETFs, bought with your own money, held in your own demat. Nobody messages you at 9:20 am. Your worst case is the drawdown column below — not a margin call. It is not an income either: nothing is paid out each month, and every gain it books is taxed in the year it is booked. In its backtest SmallMicro 500 once spent 16 months below a previous high — money you will need sooner than that does not belong here. Work under an employee trading code? Here is how the dashboard respects it →
after our fee as well, at ₹10,00,000: 19.7%
Both over the same 61 months, Sep 2021 → Sep 2026. Ours is a backtest, after 20% short-term tax. The fund's is its real Direct Plan return, measured from AMFI's published NAVs, after 12.5% LTCG. Not a recommendation of any fund.
Ten minutes on the 1st. Then nothing.
Every strategy rebalances once a month. The model does the re-scoring; you place the resulting orders in your own broker, in your own time. Here is the whole of it.
Your year, with one book: twelve sessions of about ten minutes on the 1st. ITR-2 instead of ITR-1 — your broker's Tax P&L carries the detail. Advance tax, if this year's tax beyond your salary TDS reaches ₹10,000: up to four payments, and the dashboard works out each one. On a 12-month plan, one renewal.
How the ten minutes add up
Bar height is how many months landed on that order count; the number above each bar is that count of months, the number below is the orders. The highlighted column is the median, 14. Backtest, 61 months.
The ten minutes are genuinely yours: MindForge never holds your funds, never has access to your broker and never executes a trade on your behalf — you place every order. Month one is the full list. After that you trade only what changed — which, over five years of backtest, has been about half the book: typically 14 orders a month on SmallMicro 500 and 12 on LargeMidcap 250, and never fewer than 6. The dashboard groups them into Zerodha baskets, so that is two confirmations, not fourteen — and ten minutes is two basket confirmations, not ten minutes of deciding anything. On Zerodha you can do it at night: orders placed in the evening are queued as after-market orders for the next morning's open. On Groww or Upstox it is one tap per name; on any other broker — including the bank brokers many salary accounts come with — it is one order ticket per name, worked down a numbered list the dashboard builds for you. On a 3-, 6- or 12-month plan, skip a month and nothing breaks — the next list is waiting when you come back.
If you invest from a salary, you will not arrive with a lump sum and stop. You start with what you have and add what you save each month — so the dashboard has a tool for exactly that: Add money takes the amount, splits it across the picks at their model weights in whole shares at today's prices, and puts the cash the rounding leaves over into the most underweight names. It is the same ten minutes, and it is on the sample screen below. And when you need some of it back — a down payment, school fees, a sabbatical — Take money out does the reverse: it lists the sales that leave the rest of the book as close to the model as whole shares allow.
The whole product, free, before you pay anything.
We would rather you watched the process run than took our word for it. One of the three strategies is free permanently — the complete model portfolio, not a cut-down version of it. No countdown, no feature held back, no card.
₹0 · no card · the full MultiAsset book
Three more free tools if you like to dig, none of which ask who you are: Stock Scanner, Integrity Score and the FII/DII tracker with its monthly Factor Report.
Two strategies. Two accounts. Two records we don’t write.
Each paid strategy is traded in its own Zerodha account, and Zerodha publishes that account’s realised P&L — closed trades only, over the account’s whole history — on its own verified page. The figures below are ours; the record behind the link is not.
Green: the model portfolio since the last rebalance, not audited client returns. The CAGR pair: the backtest, simulated. The link: Zerodha’s own record of the account’s closed trades. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. MultiAsset is free and is not traded in a dedicated account.
How to read these three figures
Three different things, deliberately kept apart. The green figure is the model portfolio’s move since the last rebalance — not audited client returns and not the account’s P&L. The CAGR pair is a backtest: simulated, not live trading. Only the linked page is the broker’s own record — open a card to see it. How to read it: its total counts every closed trade since the account opened, including any made before the account was given to its strategy, and it shows no open positions and no percentage return. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. MultiAsset is free and is not traded in a dedicated account.
Three books. Most people need one.
A free multi-asset book, a large-and-midcap book, and a small-cap book to size smallest. If you are unsure, start with the free one.
Which months each backtest covers
1 month is one book — the picks current when your access starts. The next month's set needs a renewal. How the plans differ
Built as a satellite — the highest-conviction book we run, and the one to size smallest. Equal weight, rebalanced on the 1st. The backtest shows +32.66% a year over the Nifty Smallcap 250, after tax.
Built as a core-plus — fifteen large and mid-cap names, in the part of the market you already own through funds. Equal weight, rebalanced on the 1st. The backtest shows +10.73% a year over the Nifty LargeMidcap 250, after tax.
Built as a core — eight ETFs across equity, gold, silver and debt, rebalanced on the 1st, and free. The backtest shows +6.61% a year over the Nifty 50, after tax. At a 30% tax slab the real after-tax figure is lower — why →
The full fee comparison — a 2% fee, a direct plan and ours over ten years
What a 2% regular-plan or PMS fee costs on a ₹15,00,000 portfolio over 10 years
Both totals over the same ten years, drawn to the same scale.
Illustration, not a forecast: both cases assume the same gross return, compounded yearly, and the only difference modelled is how the fee is charged. Actual expense ratios, exit loads and taxes vary. Run it on your own numbers → Already hold a fund? Compare it against a MindForge book →
From here to your first orders, in three steps
Choose a book, sign up, and on the 1st place the orders. The phone plays each step the way the site shows it.
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MultiAsset is free; LargeMidcap 250 and SmallMicro 500 are monthly plans. Most people need one book — if you are unsure, start with the free one.
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Your email, the book and, for a paid plan, how long. Your dashboard link arrives by email within 24 hours; a paid plan’s payment is set up with you on WhatsApp, and its first month is free.
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On the 1st your dashboard lists the orders for your capital. Send them to Zerodha as a basket, or work down the list in any broker, and tick each one off. You place every order; we never touch your money.
An illustration. The member, company names, amounts and orders are placeholders — not MindForge’s picks, a recommendation or investment advice.
How much of your money this is supposed to be.
The prices above come with a recommended investment. That figure is about whole-share rounding — it is not a view on how much of your wealth belongs in one book. Here is what each one is built to be, and what its worst backtested fall would have been in rupees at the size you choose.
| If this strategy is… | of it |
|---|---|
| MultiAssetdeepest fall -11.6%up to 4 months below a previous high | — |
| LargeMidcap 250deepest fall -23.1%up to 16 months below a previous high | — |
| SmallMicro 500deepest fall -24.2%up to 16 months below a previous high | — |
Each figure is the paper loss at the bottom of that strategy's worst stretch in the backtest, on the slice of your corpus shown — arithmetic on the published drawdown and the number you typed, not a forecast and not a recommendation. The honest test is not whether you like the CAGR; it is whether you would still have been holding at the bottom of that column. We publish research as a SEBI-registered Research Analyst and do not give personalised advice — how much belongs here is your decision, and a qualified adviser's.
The fee against a fund, at your size
Built on 50 years of academic research.
Factor investing is not a trend — it is peer-reviewed finance that has held up for fifty years. Every signal these models use has to clear five tests: persistent, pervasive, robust, investable, intuitive.
The fifty years, in four steps
From a whole universe to what you actually hold.
Both equity strategies run the same disciplined pipeline each month — no overrides, no gut calls. Here's the path from index to portfolio. (MultiAsset rotates eight ETFs by score instead — there is no universe to rank.)
The five steps, drawn out
How the list narrows, step by step
A research service, not a money manager.
Total transparency
Every monthly rebalance is published in full — exact tickers, exact weights. No black-box claims. You see what the model sees, and no published cycle has ever been rewritten.
You own everything
MindForge never holds your money or your shares, and never places an order for you. Stop at any time and every stock stays in your own demat.
What happens if you stopSEBI registered
Research published under a SEBI-registered Research Analyst. Registration is not a guarantee of performance or returns — the grievance route and complaints data are published.
Disclosures & Investor CharterBuilt by practitioners, not theorists.
MindForge Capital was founded by people who build and run these models themselves.
Everything people ask before subscribing.
Starting
What is MindForge Capital?
MindForge Capital is a research platform founded by Sagar Shekhawath, a SEBI-Registered Research Analyst. It publishes systematic, factor-based model portfolios for Indian markets. Three strategies are maintained — MindForge MultiAsset (an 8-asset ETF rotation), MindForge LargeMidcap 250 (15 stocks) and MindForge SmallMicro 500 (15 stocks). Every portfolio is rebuilt by a quantitative model on a fixed schedule and delivered to members as a plain list of holdings and weights. There is no discretionary stock-picking and no tips.
How much does a subscription cost?
MindForge MultiAsset is free for everyone. MindForge LargeMidcap 250 is ₹999 per month and MindForge SmallMicro 500 is ₹1,499 per month. Quarterly, half-yearly and annual billing carry 5%, 10% and 20% discounts respectively, and new members currently get their first month free. You can subscribe to one strategy or to all three. The Fee Calculator compares a flat subscription against a percentage-of-AUM fee at your own portfolio size.
How much capital do I need to start?
Each strategy card shows the capital that book works from: ₹20,000 for MultiAsset, ₹6,85,000 for LargeMidcap 250 and ₹65,000 for SmallMicro 500 — the smallest amount at which every name in this month's book can be bought in one whole share. Below it, some holdings cannot be bought at all, so the book you hold is not the model's. Each card also shows a recommended size: the point at which whole-share rounding stops pulling your weights away from the model's. It is not a minimum, and it is not a view on how much of your money belongs here. A flat fee weighs more on a small corpus, so the fee at your own size is worked out under Where this fits.
Do I need a demat account, and who places the trades?
You need your own demat and trading account with any Indian broker. MindForge Capital delivers the month's holdings and weights to your member dashboard, sized to whatever capital you enter; you place those orders yourself. We never take custody of your funds, never have access to your broker account, and never execute or place an order for you. On Zerodha the dashboard groups each month's orders into Kite baskets, so placing them is a couple of confirmations, and orders placed in the evening queue for the next morning's open; on other brokers it is one order ticket per name, in the order the dashboard lists them.
Do I have to sell my mutual funds to start?
No. Many people keep the funds they have and send only their new monthly savings to a book — the dashboard's Add money splits each month's amount across the picks. If you do move money out of a fund, the switch has a cost that staying does not: tax on the gain you realise (for an equity fund held over twelve months, 12.5% on gains above ₹1,25,000 in a year; held twelve months or less, 20%), and any exit load, often 1% in the first year. The comparison calculator takes both off before it compares. This is general information, not tax or investment advice.
What is the difference between the monthly and the 3-, 6- and 12-month plans?
Two things. The longer plans cost less per month — 5%, 10% and 20% off. And they update themselves: on a 3-, 6- or 12-month plan the new book replaces the old one on your dashboard on the 1st, and we email you when it lands. A 1-month plan is one book — the one current when your access starts — and it does not change during that month; to get the next month's book, you renew. If you want the monthly routine without renewing each month, choose a longer plan. MindForge MultiAsset is free, has no plan to choose, and updates every month.
How often are the portfolios rebalanced?
All three strategies rebalance monthly. On each rebalance the model re-scores its universe and publishes the new holding list to your dashboard — every ticker, its weight and its recommended price. Between rebalances we review all three portfolios twice a month; a review changes nothing you hold and asks nothing of you. You place the resulting orders in your own broker account, in your own time — MindForge never touches your money or executes a trade on your behalf.
Your job, your tax, your money
I work at a listed company, a bank or an audit firm. Can I use this?
Usually, yes — with your employer's rules first. If you are a designated person at a listed company, SEBI's insider-trading rules restrict your trades in that company's shares, and usually your family's: pre-clearance, closed trading windows, and no opposite trade within six months. Banks, fund houses, brokers and audit firms often go further and cover every trade — pre-clearance, a minimum holding period, a restricted list. MindForge never places an order for you, so your employer's process works as it always does: you ask, you get approval, you place the orders yourself. The member dashboard helps in three ways: a restricted list of names it will never size or trade for you, a minimum holding period that holds a sale until the date you set, and a copy-ready list of the month's orders for your pre-clearance request. What it cannot change: a monthly book sells about half its names each month, so if your employer bars selling anything within six months of buying it, these books will not fit, and you should not try to make them. This is general information, not legal advice; your employer's code of conduct decides.
What does monthly rebalancing do to my tax return?
Every gain is short-term. All three books rebalance monthly, so no position is ever held twelve months, and each realised gain is taxed in the year it is booked — at the 20% short-term rate on shares and Indian equity ETFs, which is already subtracted from every CAGR published on this site. MultiAsset is the exception: short-term gains on its Nasdaq-100, gold, silver and bond ETFs are taxed at your income-tax slab — 31.2% at the 30% slab, with cess — so for a 30%-slab investor its real after-tax figure is lower than the one published. The paperwork is the part nobody warns you about: at the models' measured turnover that is roughly 170 realised transactions a year on SmallMicro 500 and about 140 on LargeMidcap 250. In practice your broker produces the Tax P&L statement for you, and you carry one summary into your return rather than typing out every row. Short-term gains do change your form: with them you can no longer file ITR-1, and a salaried filer usually moves to ITR-2. And because your salary TDS is worked out on your salary alone, these gains are not covered by it: if your tax for the year beyond what your employer deducts comes to ₹10,000 or more — ₹50,000 of short-term gains is ₹10,000 of tax at 20% — it is due as advance tax, in instalments by 15 June, 15 September, 15 December and 15 March. Tax on a gain paid by the next instalment after you make it costs no interest; a missed instalment costs 1% a month. One thing works in your favour and we deliberately do not claim it: losing months offset gains under the actual rules, and our published figures assume they do not — tax is modelled at 20% on every profitable month with no set-off, the harshest reading. Your real outcome should therefore be better than the figures shown, not worse. None of this is tax advice; your slab, your other income and your set-offs are yours.
Can this give me a monthly income?
No. These are growth books: any dividend a stock pays goes straight to you as the shareholder, but nothing else is paid out, and none of them is built for income. What a book does instead is compound — and every gain it books at a rebalance is short-term and taxed in the year it is booked, which is already subtracted from every CAGR on this site. It also falls. In its backtest, before tax, SmallMicro 500 lost money in 14 of 61 months and once spent 16 months below a previous high. Money you need for expenses, or within the next few years, does not belong in an equity book.
Can I take money out when I need it?
Yes, at any time — the shares are in your own demat. Sell what you need in your broker; the money reaches your broker ledger the next working day and your bank when you withdraw it from there. To keep what stays invested in step with the model, the member dashboard's Take money out splits a withdrawal across the book: you enter the amount and it lists the sales, in whole shares, that leave the rest of your book as close to the model's weights as whole shares allow, and says how the gains on them are taxed. It is arithmetic on your own numbers, not a recommendation to sell. A book is not built for income, so money with a date on it belongs somewhere steadier.
What happens if I stop or cancel?
Your shares are yours. They were bought in your own demat account with your own money, and MindForge never had access to either, so stopping changes nothing you hold — you simply stop receiving new books. You can keep the stocks, sell them or manage them however you like. Dashboard access runs to the end of the term you paid for, and billing, cancellation and refunds are set out in section 9 of our Terms of Service.
What if I miss a rebalance?
Nothing breaks. On a 3-, 6- or 12-month plan the dashboard always shows the current book, and its “What changed this cycle” list names the orders that bring you back to it, even after a skipped month. On a 1-month plan the book does not move until you renew. What a skipped month does mean is that your holdings drift from the model's for that month, so what you hold will not match its published figures.
Risk and proof
What returns do the strategies show?
Each strategy page publishes its backtest CAGR — after 20% short-term capital-gains tax — beside the same-period after-tax CAGR of its own benchmark index, plus the real live return for the current cycle where one exists. Backtested figures are simulated on historical data — they are not real trading results, they carry survivorship and other methodology limitations that are documented in full on the Disclosures page, and past performance does not indicate future results. Investing in equities, and particularly in small and microcap stocks, can result in permanent loss of capital.
How much of my portfolio should this be?
MultiAsset is built to be held as a core — eight ETFs across equity, gold, silver and debt, and the shallowest backtested fall of the three. SmallMicro 500 is built to be a satellite: fifteen small and micro-cap names is a concentrated book by design. We publish the deepest backtested fall for each strategy precisely so you can size against it — the honest test is not whether you like the CAGR, it is whether you would still be holding after the drawdown. The recommended investment on each card is about whole-share rounding, not about how much of your wealth belongs here; that second question is yours, and a qualified adviser's. We are a Research Analyst and do not give personalised advice.
Is the live P&L on Zerodha real, and why are there two links?
MindForge LargeMidcap 250 and MindForge SmallMicro 500 are each traded in their own Zerodha account, and Zerodha publishes a verified page for each, generated by the broker from the account’s own trades — so there is one link per strategy. What that page shows is the account’s realised P&L: closed trades only, in rupees, over the account’s whole history, including any trades made before the account was given to its strategy. It does not show open positions or a percentage return, so it is a different measure from the live model figure on this page. These are real orders in real accounts, which is a different thing from the backtests shown elsewhere on this site: a backtest is simulated on historical data, a verified P&L is what actually happened. The two links sit side by side at the top of this page and on each strategy page. Returns in a personal account will differ from yours — entry timing, capital and whole-share rounding all move the result — and past performance does not indicate future results.
Is MindForge Capital SEBI registered?
MindForge Capital itself is not a SEBI-registered entity — it is a research platform. The SEBI registration is held by Sagar Shekhawath, the founder, who is a SEBI-Registered Research Analyst. All research published on MindForge Capital is published under his registration. We are not a portfolio manager, investment adviser, broker or fiduciary: we publish research, and you make and place every investment decision yourself. The registration details, the Investor Charter, the grievance-redressal escalation matrix and our complaints data are published in full on the Disclosures page.
Compared with the alternatives
Why not a smallcase, an index fund or a PMS?
All three are reasonable, and they solve different problems. An index fund is the cheapest way to own the market and asks nothing of you; our strategies page puts each book beside real funds in its category, each after its own tax. A PMS is a managed account, with a ₹50 lakh minimum set by SEBI. A smallcase is a platform on which SEBI-registered analysts and advisers publish model portfolios like ours; it adds one-click ordering through many brokers and automatic SIPs, and charges its own per-order transaction fee on top of the manager's subscription. What MindForge adds is a published record: after-tax backtests, a free book you can run before paying, and two dedicated accounts whose P&L Zerodha publishes. What it does not have is one-click ordering outside Zerodha.
Why not a momentum or factor index fund?
It is the closest thing to what we do, and a fair choice. A factor index fund also follows published rules: it holds an index of 30 to 50 stocks chosen on one style — momentum, quality, value or low volatility — rebalanced about twice a year, for an expense ratio usually under 1%. You place no orders, and gains held over a year are taxed as long-term. Our books differ on each of those: 15 names ranked on several price- and volume-based signals together and re-ranked every month, so every gain is short-term and a year means roughly 140 to 170 orders; a flat fee instead of an expense ratio; and a backtest and live record published in full. Which style leads moves around — our free monthly Factor Report tracks the flagship factor funds — and the strategies page puts each book beside real funds over the same months. Not a recommendation of any fund.
Are the Stock Scanner and Integrity Score free?
Both are free and need no account. The Stock Scanner filters 2,000+ NSE companies on 40+ fundamentals — valuation, profitability, growth and leverage — with a full equity report for every stock. The Integrity Score grades every listed NSE company 0–100 on Quality (profitability and balance-sheet health) and Value (how cheaply it is priced). The FII/DII activity tracker and the monthly Factor Report are free as well.