Mutual fund basket planner: from eight answers to five SIPs

What problem does the planner solve?

A person who has decided to start investing has two questions: how much in what kind of fund, and which fund in each kind. The first needs their numbers. The second needs data on every scheme. The basket planner takes eight answers and answers both, printing every rule it applied beside the result.

The form is open to anyone. The basket itself appears only to signed-in users of a free account. A box at the top of the page says it is a rules-based illustration, not investment advice, and that WealthTicker is not a SEBI-registered adviser.

The questions, as labelled on the form

• Your age (18–75) and Invest for (years) (1–40)
• Monthly take-home (₹) and Monthly expenses (₹); the form shows the monthly surplus under them
• Already invested (₹)
• What's it for?: Retirement, Child's education, Home purchase, General wealth or Tax saving
• Target amount (₹, today's money — optional)
• I may need this money at short notice, which rules out anything with a lock-in
• If your funds fell, you would…: conservative, moderate or aggressive
• Income tax slab, I have 6 months of expenses set aside, and I file under the old regime and want to use 80C, which adds an ELSS sleeve

Two sliders follow. Deploy 70% of surplus runs from 30% to 100%; the rest absorbs lumpy annual spending. Assume 11% equity return runs from 8% to 14%. If you are unsure about the risk answer, the risk profile quiz fills it in.

The worked example

A hypothetical 35-year-old fills it in: 15 years, take-home ₹1,20,000, expenses ₹70,000, ₹3,00,000 already invested, saving for retirement with no target amount. They choose moderate, the 20% slab, an emergency fund in place, no 80C sleeve, and the default sliders. The basket below was built on data as of 15 October 2026.

The headline tiles.

The rules list explains each step. Risk capacity scores 82.6/100, from horizon (100/100, weight 40%), savings rate (88, 25%), age (88, 20%) and existing corpus (20, 15%). That reads "aggressive", but the plan is kept at moderate: capacity never pushes a cautious investor up. The moderate row of the 10-years-and-over table sets 65% equity, 30% debt, 5% gold. The tile reads 64/30/6 because it reports the split of the rounded rupee SIPs. A de-risking schedule then steps equity from 65% down to 30% by the last year, and the projection compounds at each year's blended rate.

The five funds. The picks are grouped by role, each with its monthly amount:

Every pick is a Direct plan in the Growth option, with assets over ₹500 crore. Each is ranked against peers in the same SEBI category on returns, risk and cost, and each card prints its reasons. The large-cap pick shows "Score 80.69/100 among Large Cap peers", with consistency and manager tenure at the 95th percentile. The equity holdings are also checked, so two picks do not own the same stocks twice.

The basket as one portfolio.

• Weighted cost: 0.58%
• Blended volatility: 10.0%
• Worst fall on record: −22.7%
• Stock duplication: 19.2%
• Fund houses: 5 of 5

Volatility and the worst fall come from a weighted index of the five funds' daily NAVs, so they include the effect of holding them together. Stock duplication is the money-weighted average overlap between pairs.

If you had started 5 years ago. The backtest runs this SIP through each fund's real NAVs for the last 60 months. Invested ₹21.00L over 60 instalments; would be worth ₹27.84L; XIRR +11.59%, +32.56% absolute. The note under it calls this survivorship-biased by construction. The funds were picked with data that includes the tested period, so a basket you could have chosen five years ago would almost certainly have done worse.

After the basket

Two buttons sit above the list. Add all to watchlist stars every pick, and Compare the 4 largest opens the four biggest SIPs on the compare page with overlap and cost side by side. If you have imported a CAS, funds you already hold are flagged, so a pick reads as a top-up. Your answers are saved to your account, and the Portfolio page then measures its allocation against this plan.

The link carries every answer in its query string, so a built basket can be shared or reopened; bare /plan always starts blank.

What the planner does not do

• It does not know your tax position, loans, insurance or other assets. The disclaimer box says so.
• It does not rebalance. It sets a starting point; staying near it is up to you.
• Its projections are assumptions. 11% on equity, 6.5% on debt and 7% on gold blend to 9.41% here; moving the slider shows how much they matter.

For the thinking behind a core and a satellite, see core and satellite investing. For one way to choose within a category by hand, shortlisting a fund with the screener walks through it, and lump sum or SIP covers the ₹3 lakh already invested. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy any of these funds.