# The On-Ramp Is Not the Destination

_Systematic Investing . 2026-07-29 . By Tanmay Kurtkoti. Educational, illustrative, not advice._

Saturday morning a friend forwarded me his first RupeeCase screenshot. Ten stocks. Rs 24,000 invested. He wanted to know which strategy to upgrade to next. I asked how long he had been in. Three weeks.

Three weeks is not enough time to learn anything about systematic investing. It is enough time to learn what the screen looks like when it is green. The lesson lives in what happens when the screen turns red and stays red for twenty months.

> The marketplace sorts by CAGR. The Nifty 10 sits at the bottom. That is exactly where it belongs.

The upgrade question tells you how most people read the marketplace. They see a menu sorted by return and assume the bottom of the list is the worst option. It is not. It is the starter. The strategy equivalent of learning to drive in an empty parking lot before you merge onto the highway. And nobody judges a parking lot by how fast it lets you drive.

## The bottom of the shelf

The [RupeeCase marketplace](https://rupeecase.com/strategies/) lists sixteen strategies. Sort by five-year CAGR and the Nifty 10 lands last at 13.97 percent. The Alpha 5, which picks five stocks from the Nifty 500, tops the shelf at 58.34 percent. A 44-point gap. That gap is not a flaw in the strategy. It is a consequence of the universe each one draws from.

The Nifty 50 is fifty of the most liquid, most analyst-covered, most widely held stocks in the country. Running a momentum filter on a pool that has already been screened for quality and size captures less alpha than running the same filter on a wider, rougher pool. Same signal. Same equal-weight allocation. Same rebalance cadence. Only the universe changes. On the Nifty 500, the same framework generated 48.02 percent. On the Nifty 50, it generated 13.97.

Think of it this way. The Nifty 10 is fishing from a barrel of fifty names that institutions already own. The Alpha 5 is fishing from an ocean of five hundred that includes midcaps, smallcaps, and names nobody on Dalal Street covers. The ocean has more alpha. The barrel is cheaper to learn from.

What the narrow pool gives back in return, it offers in accessibility. The minimum capital for the Nifty 10 is Rs 24,000. Ten stocks at roughly 10 percent each, restricted to names trading under Rs 2,500. The Allcap strategy runs the same logic on the Nifty 500 and needs Rs 2,50,000. That is more than ten times the entry point for roughly three and a half times the return.

_[Figure: Growth comparison: Rs 24,000 invested in Nifty 10 vs Nifty 50 over five years. Figure 1 . Rs 24,000 invested in the Nifty 10 strategy versus the Nifty 50 index over five years. Strategy CAGR 13.97 percent vs benchmark 10.44 percent.]_

Rs 24,000 in the Nifty 10 five years ago grew to Rs 46,154. The same amount parked in the Nifty 50 index grew to Rs 39,446. A gap of Rs 6,708. On Rs 10 lakh, that gap would widen to Rs 2.80 lakh. On Rs 24,000, the gap is small enough that you can focus on the ride instead of the destination.

## What the numbers actually say

_[Figure: Key performance metrics: Nifty 10 strategy versus Nifty 50 benchmark over five years. Figure 2 . The Calmar ratio (return per unit of max drawdown) is below the benchmark. The only strategy on the shelf where that is true.]_

The Sharpe ratio is 0.83 against the benchmark's 0.78. The extra return barely compensated for the extra volatility. The Calmar ratio says something sharper. At 0.59 against the Nifty's 0.62, the Nifty 10 delivered less return per unit of maximum drawdown than the index itself. It is the only strategy on the marketplace where that is true.

The maximum drawdown hit 23.47 percent. On Rs 24,000, that is Rs 5,633 gone from the screen. The fall is not the hard part. The recovery is. A 23.47 percent drop requires a 30.7 percent climb just to get back to where you started. The Nifty's worst drawdown of 16.92 percent needed only 20.4 percent. That 10.3 percentage point gap in the climb is the price of holding ten names instead of fifty.

That asymmetry is not unique to this strategy. It is how the math works. A 10 percent loss needs 11.1 percent to recover. A 20 percent loss needs 25 percent. A 50 percent loss needs 100. The deeper the hole, the steeper the climb. What makes the Nifty 10's drawdown instructive is not that it was deep. It is that it was deep enough to teach you what recovery feels like, but shallow enough that the lesson cost Rs 5,633 instead of Rs 58,675.

And the drawdown did not resolve quickly. The longest stretch underwater lasted 623 days. Twenty months. A year and eight months where every time you checked, the number sat below where you started. On Rs 24,000, twenty months of negative equity is uncomfortable. On Rs 2,50,000, it is the kind of stretch that makes people question whether systematic investing works at all.

Volatility ran at 17.71 percent against the index's 14.04. A ratio of 1.26x. The strategy swings roughly a quarter more than the index it draws from. That extra movement is mechanical. Ten stocks at 10 percent each means a single name can move the portfolio. Fifty stocks at 2 percent each diffuses the same shock across more holdings.

## The real test is not the return

2024 was the good year. The strategy returned 33.8 percent. Momentum was running, large caps were rallying, and every name the filter picked contributed. But 2025 tested the thesis. The Nifty 10 lost 9.0 percent. The current year through July sits at minus 0.5 percent. Three of five calendar years were positive. The best returned 33.8 percent. The worst returned minus 9.0 percent. That is the shape of a concentrated momentum strategy. Long stretches of good, punctuated by stretches of bad that feel longer than they actually are.

The 4-week rebalance cycle is the cheapest cadence on the shelf. Sixty-six trades over five years. That keeps transaction costs low in absolute terms but means the momentum signal is staler between updates than any other strategy. In a rising market, stale momentum is free carry. In a falling market, stale momentum holds losing names one cycle longer than a faster cadence would.

The win rate was 58.62 percent against the benchmark's 57.47. An edge of 1.15 percentage points. Roughly three out of five cycles ended positive. But two out of five did not. Multiply those red weeks across a full year and you get about twenty of them. If you found yourself checking the screen during one of those weeks and imagining the same drawdown at ten times the capital, you just answered the question the Nifty 10 was designed to ask.

Then there is cost. Transaction costs over the five-year backtest consumed 22.0 percent of gross return. That includes brokerage, STT, GST, and estimated slippage. On a strategy earning 58 percent CAGR, a 22 percent cost drag barely registers. On one earning 13.97 percent, every basis point shows.

## The on-ramp is not the destination

_[Figure: The on-ramp: invest, survive, decide. Figure 3 . The starter strategy is a test of your risk tolerance at a price you can absorb.]_

Rs 24,000 is not a down payment on a portfolio. It is a tuition fee. The return is the index plus three and a half points. The lesson is whether you hold through a stretch where holding looks wrong for twenty months straight.

Once you have survived a drawdown on Rs 24,000 and did not sell, you know something about yourself that no [risk questionnaire](https://rupeecase.com/risk-profile.html) can measure. You know whether the next strategy at Rs 92,000 or Rs 2,50,000 will survive the moment it tests you the same way. The questions on a form ask how much loss you can tolerate. The Nifty 10 makes you live the answer.

The [Nifty 10](https://rupeecase.com/strategies/rupeecase-nifty) was never built to be the strategy you retire on. It was built to be the strategy you survive before you pick the one you keep.

The marketplace has fifteen other strategies above it. Some earn three times as much. Some hold ten times as many stocks. All of them require capital that makes a bad month feel expensive. The Nifty 10 makes a bad month feel like a rehearsal.

Three things I keep coming back to. The starter is tuition, not a target. An index plus three points is the return; the real product is what you learn about your own nerve. Second, a 623-day flat stretch on Rs 24,000 is cheap information. The same lesson on Rs 2,50,000 costs ten times the tuition and the exam is the same. Third, move up the shelf when the ride, not the return, is what you outgrew.

The factsheet prints 13.97 percent. That is the number people scan first and skip past. The part that matters most is the twenty months you spent deciding whether systematic investing is yours.

*Past performance does not guarantee future results. Backtested returns do not reflect actual trading and may overstate performance. Strategy returns are before advisory fees. Data: NSE BhavCopy.*