Five desks, ordered by how long a position lives

Scalping & Hedging

Seconds to hours

Very short-term trades that aim to capture small price moves, plus offsetting positions that limit how much a portfolio can lose.

Two related disciplines run by the same desk. Scalping takes many small positions intraday and closes them the same day. Hedging takes deliberately loss-making positions whose purpose is to cap the downside on holdings elsewhere in your portfolio.

Typical holding period

30 seconds to 6 hours

Positions carried overnight

None on the scalping book

Instruments

Index futures, liquid stock futures, crypto perpetuals

Minimum engagement

[PLACEHOLDER: minimum ticket size]

Crypto Trading

Days to months

Actively buying and selling crypto assets on exchanges, holding positions for days or weeks rather than minutes or years.

A discretionary book in large-capitalisation crypto assets, traded on regulated exchanges with published order books. The mandate is deliberately narrow: liquid assets only, no illiquid tokens, no lending of client assets to third parties.

Typical holding period

3 days to 3 months

Assets traded

BTC, ETH, ETC and other large-cap assets

Custody

[PLACEHOLDER: name your custodian and describe the wallet structure]

Minimum engagement

[PLACEHOLDER: minimum ticket size]

Crypto Mining

18 months to 4 years

Running specialised computers that process transactions on the Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic networks, and are paid in newly issued coins for doing so.

Hosted mining capacity in Bitcoin (SHA-256) and Ethereum Classic (Etchash). Returns depend on three things you do not control — the coin price, the network difficulty and your electricity rate — and one you do, which is the efficiency of the hardware.

Networks

Bitcoin (SHA-256), Ethereum Classic (Etchash)

Hardware

[PLACEHOLDER: rig models and hash rate per unit]

Facility

[PLACEHOLDER: location, power source and cooling]

Power tariff

[PLACEHOLDER: ₹/kWh — this drives the entire economics]

Portfolio Management & Diversification

3 to 10 years

Building and maintaining a mix of investments across different asset classes so that no single market decides your outcome.

The core mandate, and the one everything else is sized against. A written allocation across equity, debt, gold and a deliberately small satellite allocation to crypto, rebalanced on a schedule rather than on sentiment.

Typical holding period

3 to 10 years

Asset classes

Equity, debt, gold, cash, satellite alternatives

Rebalancing

Semi-annual, plus a threshold trigger on drift

Review cadence

Quarterly written review with the client

Gold Trading

Months to 8 years

Three different ways to own gold — an exchange-traded futures contract, a government bond that pays interest on top of the gold price, and physical metal.

Gold is one asset with three quite different wrappers, and the wrapper matters more than most investors expect. Each has a distinct tax treatment, liquidity profile and holding cost. Choosing between them is most of the decision.

MCX gold futures

Leveraged, exchange-traded, expires on a date

Sovereign Gold Bonds

2.5% annual interest, 8-year tenor, RBI-issued

Physical gold

Hallmarked bullion with storage and insurance

Minimum engagement

[PLACEHOLDER: minimum ticket size per route]