A researched stock portfolio, every month.

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.

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.

Each strategy card shows the capital that book works from: ₹10,000 for MultiAsset, ₹7,15,000 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. You need it once: after that, each month's savings can go in on the 1st (see “I invest every month through SIPs” below). Each card also shows a second figure, “Close to the model from”: 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.

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.

Selling has one extra step: your demat must approve it. Either sign a DDPI with your broker once (online; at Zerodha ₹100 + GST), or approve each selling day with your depository's TPIN and an OTP. We never see either.

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.

Yes, by hand, on the 1st. A book needs its “works from” amount once — ₹10,000 for MultiAsset, which is free. After that, the dashboard's Add money takes each month's savings: you enter the amount, it splits it across the current picks at the model's weights in whole shares, and the orders go to Zerodha as a Kite basket, or as a list for any other broker. A month's amount too small to buy a share of every pick is spent on the picks it can reach, and the dashboard names the ones it skipped. Two differences from a fund SIP. Nothing is automatic: you place these orders, as you place the rest of the month's. And what you add is held in a book that rebalances every month, so its gains are short-term and taxed like the rest of the book. You can keep your fund SIPs running and send part of each month's savings here. This is general information, not investment advice.

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. Started mid-month, that book is one the model replaces on the next 1st. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Starting mid-month works the same way. Your dashboard shows the current book that evening; later in a month, on a stock book, it also sets out the choice — place it now, or wait for the 1st and place the new one — and how many orders each means. A 1-month plan holds the book that is current on the day it starts, so started mid-month it holds one the model replaces on the next 1st.

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.

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 “Close to the model from” figure 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.

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.

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.

Ask it the questions SEBI asks you to put to anyone with stock ideas — including us.

Did it find you? We run no WhatsApp or Telegram tips group, and we write to you only after you register here.

Does it promise a return? SEBI lets no one promise one, and we don’t. Every return on this site is labelled backtest or live, and each book’s deepest backtested fall is published on its card.

Does it want your money or your login? You place every order in your own broker account. We never hold your money, never ask for your broker password, OTP or TPIN, and there is no app to download — the dashboard is this website.

Who answers for it? The research is published under the Research Analyst named on our Disclosures page, which also gives SEBI’s complaint route (SCORES) and our complaints data.

If any service fails one of these, walk away.

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.

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.