{"id":63909,"date":"2024-06-01T19:18:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-01T19:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/01\/how-i-finally-entered-a-5-trillion-money-making-venture\/"},"modified":"2024-06-01T19:18:17","modified_gmt":"2024-06-01T19:18:17","slug":"how-i-finally-entered-a-5-trillion-money-making-venture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/01\/how-i-finally-entered-a-5-trillion-money-making-venture\/","title":{"rendered":"How I finally entered a $5 trillion money-making venture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"How<\/div>\n
Money is a many-splendoured thing. For most people, it is a reliable, and perhaps the least subjective of all indicators of success, not-so-much success, and failure. To quote the non-Marxist Groucho, \u201cWhile money can\u2019t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.\u201dBut it was while reading Swaminathan Aiyar\u2019s column in this paper last week, in the context of the Indian stock market<\/a> reaching the psycho-numerological landmark of $5 trillion market capitalisation<\/a>, that I recalled the other line by the great non-Marxist, \u201cMoney frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Groucho\u2019s observation wasn\u2019t quite accurate\u2014many of us do make money by doing some things we dislike because there are EMIs to pay, bad lifestyle habits to sustain, pointless things to acquire \u2014he had hit upon a kind of money-making that middle-class boomers like me had ignored, even resisted, for a considerable part of our adult, earning lives: investing in the stock market and watch this potted money sprout more money. Theoretically, it allows me to step out of the usual pattern of earning money\u2014in exchange for work, some of it undesirable\u2014and watch it literally grow, thanks to some magic that I\u2019m too much of a Muggle to understand (or want to understand).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Indian middle class<\/a> has fallen in love with systematic investment<\/a> plans (SIPs),\u201d wrote Swami, \u201cin which they have a certain fixed sum deducted from their salary every month and invested in a mutual fund. Amateurs generally perform badly in stock markets\u2026. The best way is to systematically invest a fixed sum or proportion of salary every month\u2026 into a mutual fund<\/a> and leave the choice of the portfolio to a professional fund manager. This strategy has proved very successful in the last decade, and so has become increasingly popular.\u201d He was talking about me!<\/p>\n

Coming from the boondocks of 1980s middle-class India, stocks and shares had the ring of \u201ccharas and ganja\u201d in our household\u2014dangerously giddy-making things that \u201cdecent people\u201d of the professional classes didn\u2019t indulge in. <\/p>\n

Dabbling in stocks\u2014the word \u201cdabble\u201d itself giving off fumes of the dark arts\u2014was the domain of Pan Parag-chewing men in safari suits and high swivel chairs. It was two Ludo squares away from Dawood Ibrahim country.But at the same time, images of the Bombay Stock Exchange<\/a> threw up a compelling vision of a different India, so very distant from lines in banks, electricity bill queues, monthly salary cheques in envelopes\u2014the \u201csafer\u201d but oh-so-anodyne and banal interactions with money. The BSE building\u2019s Tower of Babel architecture in Bombay, resembling a giant luxury cruiser, was the symbol of another country within our country, measuring the momentum of a nation that the rest of us didn\u2019t seem to be a part of, even though we secretly hoped to hitch a ride on.The liberalised \u201990s made this allure even more alluring. Economic liberalisation coincided with my entry into the job market. I was at last plugged into the Indian economy, if not quite to the wheels of the Indian industry that were picking up dieselish pace. This was also when I started reading business magazines<\/a>, almost in a clandestine manner as if I was turning through the latest issue of Debonair (note to millennials: look it up on the internet).<\/p>\n

But just before I became a tax-paying citizen of India, Harshad Mehta happened. The \u201cWe told you so!\u201d from middle-class Middle India was resounding, booming and stentorian. If there was any plan whatsoever of putting a smidgen of my monthly savings in anything remotely \u201cstock-y\u201d, the \u201csafe-sounding\u201d mutual funds included, that got shafted by one iconic suitcase that we were told had contained \u20b91 crore\u2014\u20b967 lakh, to be precise.<\/p>\n

But the fruits of liberalisation eclipsed both the humdrum hum of a world that contained shortsighted Doordarshan as well as the amoral world of corporate safari suits \u2019n\u2019 suitcases. By the late \u201990s, I made the first forays into Ever-Ever Land by opening an account in a\u2014wait for it\u2014private bank. For a full year and more at the turn of the last century, I hoped against hope that HDFC Bank<\/a> wouldn\u2019t one fine day just shut shop and decamp with my moderately hard-earned money.<\/p>\n

By another decade, other Lakshman rekhas were stepped over one by one\u2014the most thrilling one being \u201chiring\u201d a professional fund manager. Quickly, I \u201centered\u201d the market\u2014with the Dutch courage of me not having to directly deal with the Beast of the Bourse. Perhaps, this was what giving a supari felt like\u2014you didn\u2019t do the job yourself, but hired someone to do the hit job. And for me, Tarandeep Singh remains the man. Soon, out of the same sense of a mix of peer pressure and FOMO, I was applying for a home loan, and feeling like a mix of Haji Mastan and Warren Buffet.<\/p>\n

As I read the news of the wonderful abstraction of $5 trillion market capitalisation, I finally had the courage to ask my friend, assets philosopher and guide Tarandeep to share the link that would provide me online access to my investment portfolio<\/a>. After waiting a few days, I finally opened my current holdings. The Allahabad Bank<\/a> account-holding man-child finally felt plugged into that building\u2014Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers on Dalal Street, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai, an Enfield Bullet ride away from Muqaddar Ka Sikandar\u2019s opening sequence on Marine Drive. Oh, and into 2024 \u201cShake Your Moneymaker\u201d India.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Money is a many-splendoured thing. For most people, it is a reliable, and perhaps the least subjective of all indicators of success, not-so-much success, and failure. To quote the non-Marxist Groucho, \u201cWhile money can\u2019t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.\u201dBut it was while reading Swaminathan Aiyar\u2019s column in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img.etimg.com\/photo\/msid-110627566,imgsize-235984.cms","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[602],"tags":[61212,15905,61208,61209,8643,6828,14010,61207,382,61211,16196,61206,61214,27935,61213,61210,7837,924,3687],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63909"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63911,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63909\/revisions\/63911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}