Conquering the stock market dragon

Armed with a B.Com degree, a few reels, and the confidence of my friends – I plunged into the stock market.
Express Illustration
Express Illustration
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BENGALURU: I spent three months in the stock market, adopting various strategies for myself – before I realised some truths of life I wasn’t prepared for. It’s the same story that everybody goes through. You watch a few reels and speak to a friend who has been in the game for a while. They over-simplify the stock markets for you, and you decide to take the plunge.

Also, there were my five years of studying Commerce that I assumed would benefit me. Unfortunately, the only concept I remember is of Diminishing Marginal Utility, because the teacher had explained it using rasgullas – how the second one is never as enjoyable as the first. Some philosophical concepts – like depreciation – stuck with me since they spoke about the slow degradation of objects and human beings in general. Armed with a B.Com degree, a few reels, and the confidence of my friends – I plunged into the stock market.

The first obstacle is all the jargon associated with investing. We live in a world of abbreviations, analogies, and jargon. A cloud doesn’t give us rain, cookies can’t be eaten, and firewalls don’t need to be put out by the fire department. So I developed my own ways of remembering the terms. A bull market is when investors are racing into the market like it’s the opening day of the Jallikattu festival.

A bear market is me during winters – lazing in bed, hesitant to step out, and being pessimistic about life in general. I learnt that unicorns are startups valued at more than 1 billion dollars. And gorilla investors are those who aggressively buy falling stocks. Then there’s something called ‘dip’, which is not the same as ‘drip’ – which youngsters use to signify style and panache. By the end of my first month of research, I was left confused amidst a word salad of new terms and concepts.

Hriday Ranjan
Hriday Ranjan

And then, I made my first investment. Unlike all the troubles Harshad Mehta had to go through, I just had to click a few buttons. I had read somewhere that one must know one’s ‘investor personality’ before plunging into the markets.

The only investment I had ever made was into a masala dosae stall. In two days, the cook pocketed all the money and ran away along with the cart we hired. Hence, I decided to be the cautious investor. I tracked the news, watched YouTube videos, prayed to science – and invested in my first stock.

When the stock that I picked did well, I felt like Warren Buffett in a free breakfast buffet. I patted myself on my back and smiled when I thought of my economics teachers. ‘Maybe B.Com isn’t as useless a course as I thought it was!’. I stopped just short of changing my ringtone to the title track of Scam 1992.

And then came the fall. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine flared up, and my stocks changed from green to red like tiny centipedes. Voters in the US cast their votes, the ripple effect was found in my portfolio. A tech company announces its results in Silicon Valley, and my stocks begin to quiver in fear.

It took me a few weeks to realise the truth. Investing in the stock market is only for those who have control over their anxiety. My investing role model has changed from Rakesh Jhunjhunwala to Marcus Aurelius.

I might not have learnt much about stocks, but I certainly learnt that our decisions are pointless, and we are all mere specks of dust in this absurd arrangement called life. Today when people ask me how my portfolio is performing, I ask them what the point of life is!

(The writer’s views are personal)

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