Case Study: A Family Office's Alternative Asset Allocation During a Market Downturn

An advanced case study that puts you inside the investment committee of a composite Indian family office as the COVID crash of 2020 unfolds. The family holds listed equity, debt, gold, REITs, real estate, private equity and venture funds, private credit AIFs and a Category III long-short fund. You start with the pre-crisis allocation and its hidden fault lines, then live through February to April 2020 as the Nifty falls by more than a third in weeks, Franklin Templeton winds up six debt schemes, the RBI announces a loan moratorium and fund managers keep sending capital calls. You examine how each alternative asset class actually behaved under stress, why illiquid holdings looked deceptively calm, and how the denominator effect pushed the portfolio outside its own limits. You then work through the committee's real decisions: funding commitments without selling at the bottom, whether to rebalance, and when to go on offence. The case closes by scoring the outcome through the 2021 recovery and distilling a downturn-ready playbook. The family and its numbers are an illustrative composite; the market events, regulations and asset-class behaviour are real.