# 5 vs 20 vs 50

_Strategy Spotlight . 2026-05-02 . By Tanmay Kurtkoti. Educational, illustrative, not advice._

Saturday morning I am laying three RupeeCase strategy backtests next to each other on the same screen. Same five-year window to 27 April 2026. Same Nifty 50 benchmark which closed at 10.68 percent CAGR over the period. Three different portfolio sizes. I wanted to see what concentration actually buys you and what it quietly takes back.

Five stocks. The 5Paisa Focused Alpha 5, picking from the Nifty Alpha 50 universe and rebalancing every three weeks, paid 58.34 percent CAGR over the window. Twenty stocks. The Midcap card on the Nifty Midcap 150 paid 41.21 percent. Fifty stocks. The broad Allcap on the Nifty Total Market paid 48.02 percent. If you read only the CAGR row, the call is obvious. Five wins. Move on.

Here is the part the brochure rarely puts on slide one.

The five-stock portfolio lived through 31.68 percent annualised volatility to deliver that number. The 50-stock portfolio asked for 23.83 percent. Sharpe . return per unit of risk . was 1.61 for Alpha 5 and 1.77 for Allcap. Max drawdown . the worst peak-to-trough . was -24.72 percent on five stocks and -22.70 percent on fifty. The honest scoreboard reads four-rows-to-one in favour of the broad portfolio . https://rupeecase.com/strategies/methodology shows you the rule book that drove each.

The other thing worth noticing. The 20-stock Midcap did not win a single row. Not the highest CAGR, not the highest Sharpe, not the shallowest drawdown. That is what stuck-in-the-middle looks like in numbers. The lesson is not that 20 is a bad number. The lesson is that picking a strategy by stock count alone is the wrong axis. Universe matters more . https://rupeecase.com/stocks/ shows you the underlying constituents. Rebalance cadence matters more. Whether you can hold through the worst week matters most.

The honest pick is the one you will not panic-sell at the worst moment. Volatility you can hold beats CAGR you cannot. Concentration is right only when the rule book that picks the five is sharp enough to justify the ride. If the rule is fuzzy, you are not concentrated. You are just exposed.

All three sit side by side at https://rupeecase.com/strategies/ . And which version of this trade-off you can actually live with is the question the wizard at https://rupeecase.com/risk-profile.html exists to answer before you pick.