The Two Things That Matter

Ajit Dayal Founder - Quantum Advisors & Equitymaster

1 May 2026
10 min read

The financial services industry has one great skill. It is very good at making you feel you have to rely on their services to profit and prosper. I have watched this for 35 years - in India and globally. I built Quantum because I believe the opposite was true.

Today I want to tell you what we have learned - and what we are doing with it.

There are two things that are important in a relationship between a financial services firm and a client: integrity and competence. Let me give you a brief narrative of how my experiences over the decades with these two foundational pillars have shaped Quantum.

My first experiment with investing in the 1970s was more of speculation, more of a gamble - very different from the thoughtful and disciplined approach we have evolved over the past few decades. Like many others I gambled by applying for shares in 1977 in foreign companies like Colgate and Lever, which were forced to list on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Getting allotments of a few shares was a lottery and a lucky win.

I gambled in the silver market in 1979 when the Hunt brothers cornered the silver market and silver shot up from ₹2,200 per kilo to ₹14,000 per kilo in a few months - and I was still a teenager.

In 1981, at the age of 21, I completed my bachelor's degree in economics from Jai Hind College and won admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue an MBA. By 1984 I returned to India - to a fumbling, closed economy sinking in the swamp of a socialist licensed Raj. I was optimistic that India would change and that the Indian economy and Indian stock markets would boom.

By 1989 I worked on the floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange as a sub-broker and quickly realised that the financial services industry did not always place the interest of the client first. That was disturbing.

My father was a doctor and he painstakingly - day by day, patient by patient - built the unwavering trust of his patients. Prescribing medicines that patients did not need was not his trade. Prescribing medicines because a pharma company or the chemist would give him a commission was against his belief, because he saw himself as a professional offering a service to a client, and the client paid a fee for this invaluable service. That image stayed with me.

Quantum as a group offers you two ways to invest - knowing that our services are built on the foundation of integrity and competence. Through Equitymaster, launched in 1996, we offered you the raw materials to build your own portfolio: views on stocks, information and databases on stocks and stock markets.

In 2006 we launched the Quantum Mutual Funds where we picked the stocks for the portfolios you want to invest in - but you still needed to decide how much to allocate across gold, fixed income and equity, the three broad asset classes that will allow you to have comfortable long-term sensible returns.

Now in 2026 we are offering you a comprehensive package - where after we talk to you and understand your financial objectives, Quantum can build a portfolio specifically designed for your needs.

Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only. It is not a recommendation and should not be treated as such.

Ajit Dayal is a flag bearer for the rights of investors and a firm believer that informed investors are empowered investors. As the Founder of Equitymaster, he has championed independent, unbiased equity research in India for over 25 years. With nearly four decades of experience in investment management, Ajit has also founded Quantum Advisors and Quantum Mutual Fund, staying true to his mission of putting investors' interests first.