Radhika Gupta, MD & CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, took to social media platform X to rebut market veteran Shankar Sharma's "brainwashed" jibe at SIP investors.
Sharma, the founder GQuant Investech, reshared an oped he penned in 2025, titled: “How India created a generation of brainwashed investors. And the macro disaster this has created”. In the article, he criticised mutual funds investments, calling recent trends the “largest wealth transfer in history”. He also claimed this was happening with the active involvement of wealth managers, brokers and financial media.
Sharma posted on X on Tuesday: “The perfect day to re-read what I wrote a while ago. The article that esteemed Radhika Gupta then alluded to, calling it click bait.”
I am always reluctant to respond to such messages, because I do not make comments about individuals, but about narratives.
— Radhika Gupta (@iRadhikaGupta) March 31, 2026
The original article and post referenced here addressed narratives that call mutual funds a scam and retail investors silly. I stand by every word of that.… https://t.co/ZgLkhoiCER
According to Sharma, narratives like “this time it's different” have misled investors. He said that while earlier investors beat foreign participants, this time foreign investors have profited at the expense of retail participants in India. This, he said, has created a "macro crisis".
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Reacting to the post, Gupta said on X: “Markets go through cycles, with periods of excess, correction, and everything in between. Outcomes are never uniform. In times of correction, crisis or war, any data or statistic will favour the critic. In a rally, the opposite is true. The reality, as always, lies somewhere in between.”
She defended her earlier stance on why mutual funds are not a scam. She explained that SIPs (Systematic Investment Plans) are designed to help investors participate steadily over time, not eliminate volatility or losses.
“Over time, this approach has proven more effective for most investors than more speculative or timing-led approaches (a simple check on F&O and direct equity outcomes may be helpful here). They must be judged over a long horizon,” she said.
Gupta concluded her X post by saying that optimism and discipline, rather than cynicism, are key to wealth creation. “It is easy to be cynical, but more rewarding to be optimistic. It is ultimately as the lines go, not the critic who counts… the credit belongs to the one who is actually in the arena,” she noted.
Sharma's comments, particularly naming Gupta, followed because days after his article, Gupta had published her opinion on the same site. It was titled: “Clickbait articles of mutual funds being a scam don't do citizens any service: Radhika Gupta.”
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In that article, she argued that "SIPs make money for those who invest in them. Yes, it isn't perfect. But it works. And works very well."
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