Deepa's ajja opened his first fixed deposit in 1985, at a small nationalised bank branch in Mysuru, with money saved from a government salary that never crossed five figures a month. Every five years, without fail, he walked into the same branch, renewed it, and walked out. He never checked interest rate charts online. He never compared it to anything. The FD simply continued, quietly, decade after decade, through liberalisation, through the dot-com crash, through 2008, through demonetisation, through the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Deepa herself invested forty thousand rupees last year into a small-cap fund that a finance influencer had called the "next big multibagger opportunity" during its new fund offer. Fourteen months later, that fund is down 22 percent, and the scheme has since been merged into another fund. Her ajja's boring old FD habit is still exactly where it was. Her exciting new fund is not even the same scheme anymore.
Most people assume newer financial products are better simply because they are newer. A shiny new small-cap NFO with a clever name and a slick marketing video feels more sophisticated than an old FD your grandfather has been rolling over since before you were born. Surely, the thinking goes, all that recent research, all that modern portfolio theory, all that fund manager expertise, must produce something superior to whatever a retired government employee stumbled into decades ago. This assumption feels obvious. It is also, quite often, backwards.
The Idea From a New York Delicatessen
The idea that challenges this assumption has an unusual origin story, and it has nothing to do with finance at all. In the 1960s, comedians and people from the New York show-business world used to gather at Lindy's, a popular New York deli or small restaurant known for serving simple meals and cheesecake, near Broadway, and discuss the shows that were running. They noticed something curious. A Broadway show that had been running for only a short time was more likely to disappear soon, while a show that had already survived for years seemed more likely to continue surviving. The longer something had already survived, the longer it seemed likely to keep surviving.
The journalist Albert Goldman described this observation as "Lindy's Law" in a 1964 article in The New Republic. Years later, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot developed a mathematical treatment of the idea and referred to it as the "Lindy Effect." Much later, the writer and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularised the concept further in his 2012 book Antifragile.
Taleb's claim, stated carefully, applies to what he calls the non-perishable, meaning things without a natural, built-in expiry date, such as books, ideas, institutions, and technologies. A human being is perishable. A hundred-year-old person has a shorter remaining life expectancy than a ten-year-old, because biological ageing works against them. A four-decade-old book, by contrast, does not carry any biological clock. If it has already stayed in print for forty years, there is no organic reason it must stop being read next year, and its continued survival is itself a meaningful signal.
Why Survival Itself Is the Evidence
The mechanism behind the Lindy Effect, once explained plainly, is not mysterious at all. Every year that a non-perishable thing continues to exist, it has quietly passed through a fresh round of real-world stress testing that a newer alternative simply has not faced yet. A financial practice that has survived market crashes, changes in government, changes in technology, and shifts in investor fashion has already proven, again and again, that it can remain relevant. A brand-new product has made no such proof yet. It might turn out to be wonderful. It might also disappear within eighteen months. Nobody yet knows, because it has not been tested by time.
Age, in this sense, is not merely a number. It is a running scoreboard of survival, and every additional year on that scoreboard adds some fresh evidence that the thing in question has remained viable despite the pressures that could have eliminated it.
This is precisely why old, boring financial practices deserve more attention than they usually get, and why the newest, most exciting-sounding product on the shelf deserves more scepticism than it usually receives.
Bringing This Into Money
Consider two contrasting Indian examples side by side. The Public Provident Fund, or PPF, was introduced by the Government of India on 1 July 1968. Despite changes to its rules and structure over the decades, PPF has remained a long-standing part of India's small-savings system for more than half a century. It has continued through wars, currency changes, recessions, changing interest-rate environments and enormous shifts in India's financial system.
Contrast this with the fate of many mutual fund schemes that have been launched during periods of retail investing enthusiasm. When the Securities and Exchange Board of India introduced its categorisation and rationalisation rules in 2017, the objective was to make schemes more clearly distinguishable in terms of asset allocation and investment strategy and to bring greater uniformity to similar categories. As fund houses aligned their existing schemes with the new framework, some schemes were merged, some were repositioned and some were wound up.
The PPF did not need to be reinvented every time a new investing fashion arrived. It simply remained part of the financial landscape, adapting through changes in its rules while retaining its basic identity as a long-standing savings instrument.
None of this means every old product is good and every new product is bad, and it would be a mistake to read the Lindy Effect that way. What it does mean is that time itself carries information, and that information is easy to overlook when a shiny new fund's marketing brochure is sitting right in front of you, promising returns that an eighty-year-old FD habit could never sound exciting enough to promise.
Where the Comparison Needs Care
The Lindy Effect is a useful heuristic, not a guarantee, and it is worth being honest about where it can mislead an investor rather than help one. Some old financial products survive not because they are genuinely good for the customer, but because they are propped up by strong distribution networks, high commissions for the agents who sell them, or simple investor inertia rather than merit. A traditional endowment insurance policy that has been sold in India for decades is a good example. Its age alone does not make it a sound investment, because it has survived largely due to how it is sold, not due to the returns it delivers, which are often well below what a simple mutual fund SIP would achieve over the same period.
So the presence of a long track record should raise a fair question rather than settle the matter outright. Has this thing survived because it keeps proving its worth to the people using it, or has it survived because the people selling it have simply been very good at selling it. The Lindy Effect points an investor toward asking that question. It does not answer it for them.
There is another important distinction. Even if something has survived for decades, that does not automatically make it suitable for you. A product can be old, durable and widely trusted and still be wrong for your goal, time horizon, liquidity needs or risk tolerance. Longevity is evidence. It is not suitability.
The Money Vichara Reflection
There is something else worth noticing here. We often evaluate financial products by looking forward. What return might this fund generate? How much could this investment grow? What does the fund manager expect? What does the latest research say? Those questions are important, but perhaps there is another question that deserves to come first: what has already been tested by time? A product launched last year can have an impressive strategy, an experienced fund manager and a beautifully designed presentation. But it has still lived only one year of its financial life. An older alternative may look less exciting precisely because it has already spent decades being tested by changing markets, changing regulations, changing technology and changing investor preferences. Its survival does not make it automatically superior. But it gives us something the new product cannot yet offer: a history of having survived.
Deepa's ajja never read Antifragile, and he certainly never used the phrase Lindy Effect at his bank counter in Mysuru. He simply trusted a financial practice because it had already proven itself to him, year after year, long before anyone had given that trust a fancy name.
There is a real lesson sitting quietly inside that habit, and it has little to do with FDs specifically and everything to do with how a person should look at any financial product being sold to them today. Before getting excited about the newest fund with the cleverest name, it may be worth asking a simpler question first.
How long has this actually been around, and what has it already survived to earn the right to still be here?
That is the real vichara.
This blog shares personal opinions for educational purposes only. The author is not registered with SEBI. This is not financial advice. © 2026 Money Vichara.
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