About
Fifteen years of buying it first.
HDP Wealth is not a large firm, and it is not trying to become one. It is Hemal Patel, a research process, and a client list that has grown almost entirely by referral.
How it started
I began in mutual funds on the distribution side, and learned quickly that the industry’s incentives and its clients’ interests are not automatically aligned. The product that pays the most to sell is rarely the one that belongs in a retirement corpus.
So I built the practice around a rule that resolves the conflict without needing to be policed: I buy it first. If a fund or a structure isn’t good enough for my own money, it doesn’t get recommended to yours.
What I’ve learned
That most investors don’t fail because they picked the wrong fund. They fail because they sold a reasonable fund at the wrong moment — and nobody was there to talk them out of it.
That the adviser’s real job is behavioural as much as analytical. Selecting the portfolio is perhaps a third of the work. Helping someone stay in it through a bad eighteen months is the rest.
And that transparency about my own positions buys more trust than any brochure. Clients ask what I hold. I tell them.
15+
Years in mutual funds
Through 2008, 2013, 2020 and everything since — several full cycles, not one long bull run.
20%+
Personal annualised return
On my own portfolio, as at 31 December 2025. Historical, personal, and not a guarantee of what any client portfolio will do.
100%
Own capital first
Every instrument recommended to a client has been held in my own portfolio beforehand.
Risk is permanent loss of capital, not volatility.
A portfolio that falls thirty per cent and recovers has been volatile. A portfolio that falls thirty per cent because the underlying business was broken has lost money. Only one of those is worth losing sleep over — and only one of them is avoidable through research.
Time in the market beats timing it.
I have never met anyone who reliably called tops and bottoms, including people who were paid very well to try. We plan in decades and rebalance on rules, not on forecasts.
If I wouldn’t hold it, it doesn’t enter your portfolio.
The simplest filter I know, and the hardest to argue with. It removes an entire category of conversation about whose interest is being served.
Let’s talk about what your money is for.
No pitch deck, no product list. A conversation about your goals and whether I’m the right person to help you reach them.
Talk to Hemal