Ramesh Mehta* spent forty minutes in his wealth manager's office last October before anyone mentioned the actual question.

They had covered markets. The RBI. His daughter's upcoming wedding and whether he should liquidate anything to fund it. Then his relationship manager pulled up a single slide - a pie chart of Ramesh's current holdings - and asked something no one had asked him in eleven years of investing.

"How did this come to look the way it does?"

Ramesh, 57, a textile exporter from Surat with a net worth just north of Rs 18 crore, looked at the chart for a long moment. Sixty-one percent real estate. Twenty-two percent equity, split across nine funds. The rest in fixed deposits and gold.

"I suppose," he said finally, "it just happened."

It just happened.

Why asset allocation outweighs everything else

Across India's fastest-growing HNI wealth segment, that phrase - or some version of it - is becoming one of the most expensive sentences in personal finance.

India's high-net-worth population is expected to grow 9.4% by 2028, accounting for 3.7% of wealthy individuals globally^. The products available to them have never been more numerous: PMS strategies, alternative investment funds, international equity wrappers, structured credit, REITs, SIFs. The infrastructure of Indian wealth management has expanded dramatically. The one conversation that should anchor all of it, how should your money actually be divided, and why, is still the one most often skipped.

The result is a generation of HNI portfolios that were assembled rather than designed. And the difference, over a twenty-year horizon, is enormous.

Asset allocation - the percentage split between equity, debt, real estate, and alternatives - is the single most consequential decision in a long-term portfolio. Not fund selection. Not manager quality. Not market timing. Decades of research across global markets confirm that the asset class split explains the overwhelming majority of long-term portfolio outcomes#.

Whether you hold 60% in equity or 40% matters more than which funds sit inside that equity bucket.

Most HNI clients spend significant time on the second question. Almost none spend adequate time on the first.

Consistently, across client conversations, at first meeting, fewer than one in five can articulate why their portfolio is divided the way it is.

They can name every fund they own. They cannot explain why they hold 65% equity versus 50%. They do not experience it as a decision they made. They experience it as where they ended up.

What emerges instead are portfolios shaped by biography. A fixed deposit opened during a liquidity crisis, never unwound. Equity funds accumulated across three separate bull markets, each added for a different reason, none reviewed together. Property bought as a home that became an investment that became, quietly, the dominant asset in the portfolio.

Every piece has a story. The portfolio as a whole has none.

The consequences show up in specific, recurring ways.

Where undesigned portfolios break down

The most visible is illiquidity at the wrong moment. HNI clients with large real estate exposure routinely find themselves unable to move when an opportunity arrives - a private credit deal, a meaningful correction in equity markets, a business acquisition. The wealth exists. It is simply not accessible. The allocation that made sense during two decades of property appreciation becomes a structural constraint precisely when flexibility matters most.

The subtler problem is false diversification. Many HNI investors believe they are well-covered because they own many things. In practice, several of those things move together. A portfolio holding five Indian equity mutual funds, direct stocks in three large-cap companies, and a real estate investment in a city whose economy tracks the equity market is not diversified. It is concentrated, with extra steps.

A third pattern cuts across both: clients who built wealth through equity-heavy, high-growth portfolios and never adjusted as their lives changed. The allocation that was right at 40 is still running, largely unchanged, at 58. The risk appetite has shifted. The income need has shifted. The portfolio has not.

The corrective, practitioners say, is less technical than it sounds.

Starting the allocation conversation

A deliberate allocation conversation starts with the client, not the market. What does income look like over the next five years? What is the genuine liquidity horizon? Is this portfolio primarily for growth, preservation, income, or legacy? And, the question most avoided, how does the client actually behave when markets fall hard?

The output is not just a revised percentage split. It is a rationale: a brief that explains why each major block of the portfolio exists, what it is meant to do, and under what circumstances it should change.

Back in Surat, Ramesh Mehta spent three weeks after that October meeting working through what a deliberate allocation would look like for him. He is now reducing his real estate exposure from 61% to closer to 40% over three years, freeing up capital for liquid, income-generating assets as he moves into a phase of life where preservation matters more than appreciation.

He is not dramatically restructuring. He is simply, for the first time, deciding.

"I always thought the allocation would sort itself out," he says. "I did not understand that it already had. Just not in the way I would have chosen."

—

* Ramesh Mehta is a composite fictional character created for illustrative purposes. Any resemblance to a specific individual is coincidental.

^ Source: Knight Frank's The Wealth Report 2025

# Asset allocation's dominance over fund selection and market timing has been documented consistently since Brinson, Hood and Beebower's landmark 1986 study, and the finding has held across geographies and market cycles