I’ve been getting a version of the same message for a few weeks now.

Not always in those words. Sometimes it’s a question about FIIs pulling out. Sometimes it’s about the rupee. Sometimes it’s just a portfolio check at an odd hour, which tells its own story.

But underneath all of it, the same thing is being asked.

“I trusted the story about India for the long term. That long term is starting to feel very far away.”

I want to answer that honestly. Not with a market update. No charts. Just honestly.

Because I know what this uncertainty actually costs.

It costs in something more than percentages. It costs in the real things. A child’s college plans quietly recalculated. A retirement date that has started to feel less certain. A goal that was close enough to touch, now seeming to recede slightly. They are the things you worked for. The things you are building through us.

I think about that every day. It is why we keep returning to the plans rather than the headlines.

Yes, it has been hard and it has gone on. This is the second stretch of real turbulence in under two years, and it wears on people in a way a single bad quarter never does. Foreign money has left Indian equities in size, more this year than last. You have watched the rupee. You have watched your portfolio. And you have done the harder thing – kept going.

A bad quarter you can absorb, you tell yourself it is noise, and mostly you believe yourself. A long stretch is different. After a point, it wears at the belief underneath it. And you have felt it, which is the part that actually matters.

I won’t tell you that the fundamentals are intact and you just need to stay the course. You’ve heard that. It isn’t wrong. But it isn’t enough when the waiting has gone on this long.

You’ve heard the historical reassurances. Markets have recovered before. India has been written off before. FIIs have returned before. I won’t repeat all of that. You know it as well as I do and right now, knowing it doesn’t make the waiting any easier.

No worthwhile journey runs in a straight line. The ones that look smooth in hindsight rarely felt that way when you were in the middle of them. This one is no different. 

Disruption and direction are different things. A road can be broken in places and still lead somewhere worth going. We haven’t lost sight of where we’re going.

Which is why the question isn’t when will this end. It’s whether we’ve built the right plan together and whether we need to sit down and look at it again. 

Nobody can put a date on the market’s long term. It is an open horizon, and that is exactly why it wears at you, because there is nothing to hold it to. Your long term is not like that. It has dates in it. A fee that falls due in a particular year, a runway that begins on a particular birthday. Those are the things a plan is built around, and they are the things we can look at honestly, together, whatever the market is doing this month.

More than a lakh families have trusted Scripbox with goals like their children’s education, their retirement, the things they are building through us. That makes us careful rather than certain.

You and all of them trusted us with something precious. We will honour that trust, honestly and to the best of our ability.

Thanks for reading.

With regards,
Atul Shinghal
CEO and Founder, Scripbox

P.S. If you’ve been checking your portfolio at odd hours lately, that’s the signal. Not to sell. Just to talk.