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All worked examples

Illustrative example

The salaried professional with savings and no plan

Steady income, money accumulating in a bank account, and a growing sense of falling behind.

Not a real client. These are illustrative scenarios written to show how the framework is applied. They are not real clients, not records of actual results, and not investment recommendations. The figures are chosen to make the reasoning clear.

The situation

Starting position.

Age
Early thirties
Income
Stable salary, dual-income household
Savings
PKR 1,200,000 in a bank account
Emergency fund
None separated out
Debt
A car loan, no credit card balance
Experience
Has never bought a share

“I have savings sitting in the bank losing value to inflation. Everyone says I should invest. Where do I start, and how much should I put in?”

Working through it

The reasoning, in order.

  1. 01

    First: the money is not all available

    The instinct here is to treat the PKR 1,200,000 as the amount to invest. It is not. Before any of it goes into equities, part of it has to become an emergency fund, and in this case none has been separated out.

    Working from actual essential expenses rather than an estimate, a household like this typically needs somewhere between four and six months set aside. Call it PKR 400,000 held in cash, deliberately not invested.

    That leaves roughly PKR 800,000 as investable, and the figure matters less than the fact that it was arrived at rather than assumed.

  2. 02

    Second: does the debt change the answer?

    A car loan is usually at a rate low enough that clearing it early is not obviously better than investing. High-interest short-term debt would be a different matter. Paying that down is a guaranteed return, and no equity market offers a guarantee of anything.

    The test is simple: compare the interest rate on the debt against what you can realistically expect from investing, and remember that the debt return is certain while the investment return is not.

  3. 03

    Third: capacity and tolerance are different questions

    Capacity here is genuinely high: stable dual income, a long horizon, no dependants requiring the capital soon. On paper this person can take substantial equity risk.

    Tolerance is unknown, because they have never held a falling position with real money in it. This is the gap that produces damage: high capacity plus untested tolerance regularly produces someone who invests aggressively and then sells at the first serious decline.

    The response is not to invest less overall. It is to phase the entry, so the first real drawdown happens while only part of the money is committed.

  4. 04

    Fourth: structure before selection

    The portfolio structure gets decided before any company is considered. Roughly ten holdings, approximately equal weight, no single position beyond about 15%, no sector beyond about 30%.

    For PKR 800,000, that means positions of around PKR 80,000 each, comfortably above the level where a fixed per-trade charge consumes a painful share.

    Entry spread over roughly nine months rather than deployed at once, in tranches tied to when salary arrives.

Where it lands

The plan that comes out.

The plan that comes out of this is unglamorous: separate PKR 400,000 as an emergency fund, invest the rest gradually across about ten holdings over three quarters, and review quarterly against a written thesis for each position.

No stocks are named. What is specified are the criteria: profitable across several years including bad ones, manageable debt, a dividend the company can afford, and enough daily volume to exit without difficulty.

The person leaves able to apply those criteria to any company on the exchange, which is the actual deliverable.

What this example shows: Most of the value in a first plan comes from decisions that are not about stocks at all: how much is genuinely investable, over what period it goes in, and how large any single position is allowed to be.

We teach. You execute. Your account. Your decisions. Always.

We do not take custody of your money or execute trades for you.

Other examples

Different situations.

Your numbers, not these ones

A Launchpad call works through your actual situation (income, savings, debts, horizon) and produces a written plan you own and execute yourself.

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