Pranav Prakash Kakde
Founder and lead researcher. He scopes every mandate, directs and reviews the research, and stays on the client relationship, working with a team of six analysts.
Pranav Prakash Kakde founded Kakde Research in 2025. He works from India, on mandates that reach well beyond it, with emerging markets and India the practice’s deepest specialist capability.
Before the practice he worked in London, at a global investment bank and a financial-data company, across macro and market data roles. The two jobs put the same problem in front of him from opposite ends: the demand for a reading of an emerging market specific enough to act on — India most insistently, but never India alone — and the data infrastructure any such reading depends on, how often it gets used without being understood.
He trained as a computer engineer before taking an MSc in Finance, and that order still shapes the work. The data pipelines behind every engagement are built and maintained in-house, not lifted from a vendor summary and re-described, which is why the appendix in a Kakde Research report can be rebuilt by the person reading it.
It makes the practice comparative by design: global capital decides between markets, not about them. The work follows the evidence across whichever markets a question names. India, the market he can read furthest on his own sources, is the deepest single coverage rather than the only one.
Where India ranks badly, he says so first. That is what makes the favourable findings worth anything.
Research authorship
Published under the founder’s byline
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01
PublishedCan Global Investors Actually Capture India’s Economic Rise?
The flagship study: what a foreign dollar actually captures of India’s rise, measured inside a ten-market comparative framework. India, emerging markets and the competition for global capital.
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02
Available on requestCredibility and Transmission
RBI policy credibility and transmission, scored against major central banks — and what a policy rate that is not transmitting means for the rates and currency view.
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03
Available on requestThe Balance-Sheet Decade
Banking-system resilience: India against comparator systems after a decade of clean-up — credit depth, asset quality and where the next stress would surface.
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04
Available on requestThe Rupee, Managed
The rupee against comparator currencies: intervention, real effective rates and reserve adequacy — and what the management regime does to a foreign investor’s return.
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05
Available on requestPromoter Nation
Corporate structure and governance: promoter holdings, pledged shares and related-party norms — and what a foreign shareholder actually owns.
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06
Read onlineIndia in EM
A standing comparative franchise: where India actually stands inside the investable emerging-markets opportunity set, and when the honest answer is that it doesn’t.
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07
Read onlineWhat the Coverage Misses
Verifiable series largely absent from the coverage an allocator reads, each stated with what it does not prove and the conditions under which it would move.
Working with the team
Kakde Research is founder-led. Pranav Kakde scopes every mandate, directs and reviews the research, and stays on the client relationship; a team of six analysts assembles, checks and maintains the evidence. The people you speak to are the people doing the work, whether the engagement is a consulting project, a research assignment or an ongoing relationship. There is no account manager between the scoping call and the analysis that follows it.
Founder review on every deliverable caps how much runs at once, and the limit is deliberate. If a question cannot be answered properly within the time available, you will be told that on the scoping call, before you have spent anything.
Bring us the decision, question or assumption you need tested.
Describe what you are trying to understand, the markets it touches and what decision it relates to. We will get back to you as soon as possible.