ETMarkets Smart Talk| How to find India’s next multibaggers? Pritam Deuskar explains his GIANTS framework

What does it take to identify India’s next multibagger before the market fully recognises its potential?

For investors, the challenge isn’t just finding a company in a fast-growing sector—it is identifying businesses with the kind of competitive advantages that can sustain growth and compounding for years.

In a rapidly changing global economy, where AI, defence, semiconductors, electrification and supply-chain diversification are reshaping industries, that distinction could become even more important.


In this segment of ETMarkets Smart Talk, we speak with Pritam Deuskar, Founder & Chief Investment Officer at Wealthyvia Ventures, about his framework for identifying businesses that can become long-term compounders.

Deuskar calls it the GIANTS framework—a five-part filter that looks at Gorilla Status, Industry Dependency, Accelerating Megatrends, the Next Big Thing and a Two-Horse Race.

The idea is to identify companies with market power, pricing ability, structural demand, exposure to emerging opportunities and favourable industry structures. Edited Excerpts –

Q) We have entered an environment where geopolitical risks, global trade disruptions, currency volatility and shifting interest rate expectations can change the market narrative very quickly. What does portfolio resilience actually mean in 2026?

A) Resilience in 2026 is not the absence of volatility in a portfolio; it is the presence of certainty in its cash flows. For two decades I have watched investors confuse the two. A resilient portfolio today rests on three pillars. First, businesses with legislated or contracted demand, where order books stretch years ahead in defence, power equipment, railways and precision engineering, so that revenue is a signature already obtained rather than a forecast. Second, balance sheets with low leverage, because when conviction everywhere else is borrowed, the unleveraged enterprise is the one that survives the audit of a crisis. Third, suppliers rather than speculators, companies that are paid by every side of every race, whether in semiconductors, data centres or electrification. India offers this combination in rare abundance today: clean banks, corporate debt at generational lows, foreign exchange reserves at a lifetime high near seven hundred and eighty six billion dollars, and domestic monthly flows that have made our markets structurally deeper. Resilience, properly understood, is owning the certified, the contracted and the unleveraged, and letting the narrative change as often as it wishes.

Q) The US Fed has resumed tightening with a rate hike. What has been the immediate impact on Indian debt and equity markets, and how should investors respond?

A) In my humble experience, such cycles tend to turn through a familiar sequence, and this one has followed the script: the dollar firmed, foreign flows paused, our bond yields hardened in sympathy and the more speculative end of equities corrected first. Experienced navigators do not fear this sequence; they prepare for it, and we had. What matters is what happens after the first fortnight, and here India's position has proven fundamentally different from every previous tightening cycle. Our inflation differential with the United States is among the narrowest in our history, our current account is financed by services exports and remittances rather than hot money, and domestic institutions and systematic investment plans have absorbed the supply that foreign sellers offered. In past cycles a Fed hike exported a crisis to us; this time, with the tightening remaining orderly, it has exported little more than a discount. And discounts on businesses whose order books are contracted for a decade are precisely what patient capital prays for. The mature response to this tightening is not to reduce India exposure but to upgrade it, from the leveraged and the fashionable toward the certified and the essential, at prices the hike has kindly improved.

Q) Could a stronger dollar and higher US yields put enough pressure on the rupee to constrain the RBI's room for monetary easing?

A) It can delay easing; it can no longer dictate it, and the events of this very summer are the proof. When the pressure built, the Reserve Bank did not plead for stability; it engineered it. The special FCNR deposit window opened in June drew more than one hundred and twenty seven billion dollars from the diaspora in under three months, roughly one hundred and thirty six billion including the allied swap and hedging facilities, the largest voluntary dollar mobilisation by any emerging economy in history. The result: reserves vaulted by a record forty five billion dollars in a single week to a lifetime high of about seven hundred and eighty six billion, while the central bank's gold holdings, near eight hundred and eighty tonnes and worth around one hundred and fourteen billion dollars, now form roughly fourteen percent of reserves, double the share of two years ago. A nation whose citizens abroad will lend it a hundred billion dollars on request does not take dictation from anyone's yield curve. A modestly softer rupee in a strong dollar world is, in any case, a subsidy to precisely the exporters we favour, the engineering, components and electronics manufacturers winning work from Europe. My expectation is that the RBI will prioritise stability over speed, easing later rather than never, and that this patience will itself compress our risk premium over time. The currencies that collapse in tightening cycles belong to nations that borrowed their growth. India is growing on equity, on savings and on order books, and such growth does not beg permission from the Federal Reserve.

Q) Now that the UPI charge has been implemented, do you see it as essentially immaterial for long term investors but potentially more relevant for high frequency traders and smaller ticket transactions?

A) Precisely so, and now that it is in effect the early evidence supports that reading. For the long term investor a payment charge measured in basis points on entry is rounding error against a holding period measured in years and a compounding rate measured in high teens. For the high frequency participant and the smallest ticket sizes it has altered the arithmetic of churn, and frankly, anything that quietly discourages churn does the retail investor a favour he did not ask for. The deeper point is philosophical. UPI is one of the great public goods of our era, rails that carry more real time transactions than the rest of the world combined, and a modest charge that keeps those rails funded and expanding is the maintenance fee of a miracle. Serious wealth in equities has never been built or broken by transaction pennies; it is built by owning the right enterprises through the right decade and broken by trading brilliance one transaction at a time.

Q) Is there a risk that multiple small charges across the investment ecosystem could eventually become a meaningful drag on retail returns, given that we also have STT?

A) Cumulatively, yes, and the honest arithmetic should be spoken plainly: securities transaction tax, exchange charges, impact cost and now the payment charge can together consume a meaningful slice of returns for the investor who mistakes activity for progress. But observe who pays this toll. It is levied almost entirely on turnover, which means it is a tax on impatience, and it is nearly invisible to the investor who buys certified, contracted, unleveraged businesses and holds them across the cycle. In my two decades the most reliable drag on retail returns has never been the schedule of charges; it has been behaviour, the selling of tomorrow's compounders to fund today's excitement. My counsel is therefore twofold. Policymakers should remain vigilant that the ecosystem never prices the small saver out of ownership, for the democratisation of Indian equity is a national asset. And investors should render the entire question immaterial the only way it can be rendered immaterial: by transacting rarely and owning magnificently.

Q) Equity markets have delivered strong returns over the long term, but valuations in parts of the market remain elevated. Does resilience today require reducing equity risk, or simply becoming more selective?

A) Selectivity, emphatically, and selectivity of a new and more demanding kind. Reducing equity exposure to a nation at the beginning of its industrial noon is how fortunes are politely declined. But I must be equally direct about the other error: the selectivity of yesterday will not suffice. Consider what is actually happening in the world before naming any sector. The intelligence build out demands unprecedented quantities of chips, power and cooling; the West is rearming and re shoring after three decades of complacency; Europe's factories face energy costs two to three times American levels and an ageing workforce, so their work packages must migrate somewhere trusted; and every global prime, having learnt the lesson of concentration in one country, is actively qualifying a second source. India sits at the intersection of all four forces with the engineers, the cost curves and now the certifications, which take three to seven years to earn and cannot be bought in a hurry. Follow that logic to its conclusion and the destinations name themselves: aerospace and precision engineering winning sole source work from global programmes, semiconductor chemistry and packaging rising alongside our first fabs, electronics manufacturing climbing from assembly toward design, the transformer and grid equipment makers in a world running multi year lead times, the ancillary paid by every combatant in the intelligence race.

Within these sectors, my focus narrows further to what I call GIANTS, a filter every core holding must pass. G for Gorilla Status: dominant market share with genuine pricing power, the company that sets terms rather than accepts them. I for Industry Dependency: suppliers, customers and adjacent sectors simply cannot operate without it, making the business a toll booth on its entire ecosystem. A for Accelerating Megatrend: demand driven by a structural, long duration shift rather than a cyclical mood, so time works for the shareholder. N for Next Big Thing: real exposure to the frontier technology or category, because the future must be a tailwind on the revenue line, not a threat to it. T for Two Horse Race: an industry structure resembling a stable duopoly or near duopoly, where rational competition protects margins for decades. A business that clears all five letters is rare, and that rarity is precisely the point; when the world's most certain demand meets the market's most protected supply, compounding takes care of the rest.

Quality is a fact and value is a price, and today the discipline is to pay fair prices for businesses attached to these certain futures. This is where experience and genuine sector expertise earn their keep, because the difference between a narrative and an order book, between a story and a certification, is visible only to those who have studied these value chains for years. That difference is where the next generation of superior returns will be generated.

Q) India's macro fundamentals remain relatively supportive, but global yields and capital flows can still influence Indian bonds. What gives you confidence in India's debt market over the long term?

A) Three structural facts, each of them quietly historic. First, fiscal credibility: a government that has narrowed deficits on schedule while doubling capital expenditure is the rarest creature in public finance, and bond markets ultimately kneel to such consistency. Second, institutional demand: our inclusion in global bond indices arrived precisely as domestic pensions, insurers and provident pools entered their fastest accumulation phase, so every foreign seller now meets a patient domestic buyer, a truth this summer demonstrated when record reserves and diaspora inflows steadied the curve within weeks of the Fed's hike. Third, the inflation regime itself has shifted, anchored by food supply reforms, energy diversification and a central bank whose credibility was earned in adversity. Layer on the sovereign balance sheet, reserves at a lifetime high near seven hundred and eighty six billion dollars, gold near fourteen percent of them, and external debt among the lowest of any major economy relative to output, and Indian duration becomes what it has never been in my career: a core holding rather than a tactical visit. Global yields will impose their weather upon us from time to time. But the climate, the multi decade direction of Indian real rates and Indian credibility, points toward compression, and climate is what the long term investor is actually paid to own.

Q) What is the biggest portfolio risk investors may be underestimating today?

A) Obsolescence wearing the costume of safety. Investors lie awake fearing volatility in the new economy while sleeping soundly upon franchises the new economy is quietly dismantling. Consider what this year has already taught: the price of machine intelligence is racing toward its floor, capital light software moats once thought eternal are being questioned by the very intelligence they trained, and the proudest automakers of Europe are losing their home category to Chinese electric vehicles while the champions of Japan and Korea become acquisition targets for younger balance sheets. History delivered the same sermon in Seoul in 1997, when leverage plus euphoria turned invincible conglomerates into case studies. The underestimated risk, therefore, is threefold: owning yesterday's moats at premium prices, owning them with borrowed conviction, and analysing them with frameworks innocent of the technologies rewriting their fate. The remedy is the whole of our philosophy. Own the suppliers to every future rather than the incumbents of any past, in a low leverage nation the entire world now needs as its factory, its back office and its second source. India is not merely a market in this decade; it is the answer to a question the whole world is asking. Position accordingly, with expertise equal to the moment.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views, and opinions given by experts are their own. These do not represent the views of the Economic Times.)