“Don’t disturb us by calling for reassurance every time the market falls.”

This is just one of several disclaimers spattered across the website of Counter Cyclical Investments. It’s a six-year-old portfolio management service (PMS) firm based in Nagpur. Not Mumbai. Not Bengaluru. Nagpur—a tier-2 city in Maharashtra.

Counter Cyclical doesn’t do handholding. What it does do is continue to bet on small-cap stocks amid the broader market turmoil. And also come out as the top performer among all PMS firms for which data is available, offering 78% annualised returns on a five-year basis as of March. For perspective, if one had invested Rs 10,000 ($116) back then, they would be sitting on about Rs 1.8 lakh ($2,000) now.

 This, when the call for exiting high-risk small- and mid-cap stocks had been growing louder since September, reaching a crescendo with ICICI Prudential’s chief investment officer Sankaran NarenThe Ken ICICI Prudential MF’s investment chief warned of a crash. Did the fund house listen? in January deeming valuations “absurd”. Add to this the will-he-won’t-he mayhem of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs—that wiped out Rs 14 lakh croreTimes Of India Stock market crash today: It's a bloodbath! of investor wealth in a single day—and you’ve got the perfect storm. 

Expectedly, some small-cap-focused PMS firms, including Siddharth BhaiyaThe Ken Siddhartha Bhaiya’s Aequitas is the fund for the ultra-rich that can win by not playing’s Aequitas, had started moving holdings to cash last year. 

But not Keshav Garg, founder and director of Counter Cyclical. Rather than take any cash calls, Garg returned Rs 200 crore (or 25% of the firm’s assets under management (AUM)) to investors. He also stopped accepting fresh money from June onwards as he was “just not able to find value”. 

“At the time, we faced huge resistance because everybody wanted to put more money in the markets,” recalled Garg. The firm finally reopened to new capital, with the same old playbook: deep research to find and invest in small-cap, even nano-cap stocks since—as its website makes clear—“no company is too small”.