Founded by Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, wealth management company True Beacon is increasing focus on its newly launched Portfolio Management Services (PMS) product. 

“Since we launched the PMS product, all markers have been very positive. It is an alpha product that allows our clients not necessarily to evade the volatility that might happen in the market but to score alpha,” Richard Pattle, CEO and co-founder of True Beacon, told businessline. Alpha values are used to rank mutual funds and their investment managers’ performance. Higher alpha means that a fund often outperforms the market.

True Beacon was launched in Bengaluru in 2019 by Nikhil Kamath together with Richard Pattle, the former global Vice-Chairman of Standard Chartered Private Bank. Initially offering Category III Alternative Investment Funds, the company has added an Equity Factor Quant PMS strategy to its product suite, in addition to wealth management. The company is founded on a client-aligned fee model, and strategic value creation by connecting over 500 clients across geographies and industries.

True Beacon’s flagship fund is open-ended, with zero management fees and a 10 per cent annual performance reward on gains achieved by the company. True Beacon aims to create a community of high-net worth individuals in India and overseas, driving strategic value through global deal flow, co-investment opportunities, philanthropic initiatives and next generation educational programme.

“We launched our first product three years ago and we have grown significantly.  We are fortunate enough to have a couple of hundred clients both in India and overseas. These overseas investors come through our branch in GIFT city, which is a special economic zone,” Pattle added. The company has a team size of about 40 people with majority working in trading and technology roles. True Beacon also has a small team of relationship managers that cover its clients. Earlier this month, Abhijeet Pai, a Hyderabad-based entrepreneur and industrialist, also joined the founding team of True Beacon as a General Partner.

Further, talking about the flagship fund’s performance, True Beacon’s Chief Investment Officer, Rohit Beri said “Our flagship fund was started about three years back and by October 19, it has delivered about 69 per cent return on that fund compared to the market which has delivered only about 57 per cent. Now that number does not tell you the whole story. The whole story here is we only expose about 50 per cent of the market. If you look at our internal custom benchmark where we track the 50 per cent as a long-short portfolio and 50 per cent as the equity portfolio, that benchmark has done about 40 per cent and we have done close to 69 per cent.” 

Philanthropy Initiatives

Besides Zerodha and True Beacon, Kamath is also spearheading the Young Indian Philanthropic Pledge (YIPP). It is a philanthropic initiative where a group of Bengaluru start-up founders have come together to fund various programmes like creating model schools across the country.

“There’s a bunch of my friends in Bangalore, who have gotten lucky in one way or another by virtue of having a start-up, or having liquidity events. The vision for starting YIPP was to encourage people to start giving back early in life. We told them you do not have to wait up until you are 50 or 60 to start contributing. You can start early. We have got a good group of people together. It’s about seven or eight people but we’re hoping to grow that,” Kamath added. 

The first project that the group is funding is around education and government schools. In this project, the company picked about 200 schools in Karnataka for the first project. The second project which the group is working on deals with malnutrition in Uttar Pradesh.