VD
Vikram David
Founder & Managing Partner
Founded the firm in 1987 after a decade at a Mumbai merchant bank. Chairs the investment committee.
The Firm
A house built
A house built
to preserve
before it grows.
David Holdings was founded in 1987 to do one thing well — steward private and institutional capital across generations, sectors, and cycles. Nearly four decades on, the mandate has not changed, and neither has the order of our priorities.
Our Story
Thirty-eight years,
Thirty-eight years,
one philosophy.
The firm has grown from a single dealing room in Colaba to five practices and three offices. What has endured is the conviction that capital is to be protected first, and compounded patiently thereafter.
David Holdings opened its doors in the autumn of 1987, in a two-room office above a textile merchant on Apollo Bunder. Vikram David had spent the previous decade at a Mumbai merchant bank, and left it with a single conviction — that the families he had advised deserved counsel that outlasted any one market cycle. The firm took its first mandate, a shipping family's estate, three weeks before the global crash of October that year. The plan held. It remains a client to this day.
For its first decade the firm did one thing — discretionary planning for a small number of private families, each known to the partners by name. Growth was deliberate and slow. New relationships came almost entirely by introduction, and the partners declined more mandates than they accepted. That discipline, of choosing clients rather than chasing them, became the habit on which everything later was built.
The five practices arrived in sequence, never in haste. Markets and broking followed the registration of the firm's first trading membership; an in-house technology desk was raised in 2004 to run the firm's own order management, and later opened to select institutions. Investment strategies, then fintech and capital advisory, completed the architecture. Each vertical was led by a partner who held capital in it, and answered to the same authority.
That authority is a single investment committee. Every discretionary decision the firm makes, in any practice, passes through one room and one set of minutes. There are no siloed mandates and no internal competition for the same rupee. A family's wealth and an institution's broking flow are governed by the same philosophy, written down and signed: preserve first, compound patiently, and never confuse activity with progress.
Today the firm advises on capital across India and a Singapore desk that serves the diaspora and regional institutions. It has weathered the crises of 1992, 2000, 2008, and 2020 without losing a founding client. The office is larger, the systems faster, and the names on the door have grown. The order of priorities has not.
Our Principles
What we hold to.
Six principles govern how the firm conducts itself. They are not aspirations on a wall; they are the standing instructions by which every partner is held to account.
I
Stewardship
Capital entrusted to the firm is not transferred to it. We hold it on behalf of those who built it and those who will inherit it, and we account for it as such.
II
Discretion
A client's affairs are theirs alone. We do not publish names, we do not trade on what we are told, and we treat silence as a professional obligation rather than a courtesy.
III
Independence
The firm sells no product it would not own. We earn fees for advice, not commissions for placement, and we will recommend against a transaction whenever the transaction is wrong.
IV
Patience
We measure outcomes in cycles, not quarters. A portfolio worth holding for a decade is rarely improved by being touched each week, and we resist the temptation to confuse motion with merit.
V
Candour
We tell clients what we believe, including what they would prefer not to hear. A relationship that cannot bear an honest disagreement is not one the firm wishes to keep.
VI
Alignment
Partners invest alongside clients in the firm's own strategies. When a mandate prospers we prosper with it, and when it does not, the cost is shared at the partners' table first.
Governance & Compliance
Held to one
Held to one
standard, in writing.
The firm is registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India and is a member in good standing of the principal exchanges. Governance is not a department here; it is the structure within which every mandate sits.
Every discretionary decision passes through a single investment committee, recorded in minutes and reviewable on demand. Client assets are held in segregation, audited independently, and reconciled before each close of business. Grievances are handled by a named compliance officer within defined timelines. The arrangements below are reviewed annually and disclosed in full to clients on engagement.
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Single investment committee One committee governs every discretionary decision across all five practices, with minuted deliberations and a documented sell discipline.
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SEBI registration Registered for broking, research, and portfolio management, in good standing.
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Segregation of client assets Client securities and funds are held separately from the firm's own, with no commingling and daily reconciliation.
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Independent internal audit An internal audit function reports to the partners independently of the desks, supplemented by an external statutory audit each year.
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Grievance redressal A named compliance officer addresses investor grievances within published timelines, with escalation to the SEBI SCORES platform.
Regulatory standing · summary
— SEBI Registration
RegisteredBroking · Research · PMS
— Member Affiliations
NSE · BSE · MCX · AMFIActive member · in good standing
— Corporate Identity
David Holdings Pvt. Ltd.Incorporated 1987
— Compliance Officer
A. Pillaigrievance@david-holdings.com
Reviewed annually
Disclosed on engagement
By the Numbers
Stewardship,
Stewardship,
measured.
A few figures that describe the scale of the firm's work. They are the by-product of the discipline, never its objective.
₹ 12,400Cr
Assets under advisory
3,820+
Private & institutional clients
38
Years stewarding capital
1,140+
Research notes published
The Partnership
Stewards of
Meet the full partnership
Stewards of
the firm.
Partners hold capital alongside clients. Decisions are made by people whose names appear on the door.
AM
Anaïs Mehrotra
Partner · Private Wealth
Joined in 2002. Leads the family-office practice and the firm's estate-planning desk.
RK
Rohan Krishnan
Partner · Trading & Technology
Architect of Sovereign Terminal. Previously led the algo desk at a global Tier-1 bank.
SI
Saira Iyer
Partner · Capital Advisory
Oversees the consultancy and NBFC arms. CA, CFA. Twenty-one years with the firm.
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Begin a conversation with our private wealth team.
Engagements at David Holdings begin with an introductory meeting — in Chennai or by video. We meet by appointment.
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