💰My Investment Journey

The journey of failing miserably of making money and the lessons learned from the expedition.

I started my investment in RD and FD (which was a foolish decision) when I first started making money in 2019. Investing in RD (Recurring Deposit) with a monthly installment of around 8.5k INR each month for a period of 15 months. Next was the FD (Fixed Deposit) with all the returns and principal that I got from RD for the next six months. During this time, I was potentially looking for opportunities to invest in other means. That's when I came across the equity market and was amazed by the returns that it was capable of. I had spent the next 3 months researching the market and understanding the equities and there was so much hesitation in me to start this journey.

Ultimately, I bought my first stock on 8th March 2021. So how were the returns?

🔥Cash burns.

🔥Cash burns.

🔥Cash burns.

I knew I was terrible. I couldn't even make out a break-even. That's when I decided to start my extensive research and came to know about this beautiful fintech app - Smallcase. So basically, Smallcase is for people who want to buy a bag of stocks of a particular theme. Eventually, the Dalal street was growing and so were my stocks.

A few days later, I diverted all the money from FD to the equity market. That's when I realized how stupid I was in investing in funds that don't beat inflation.

Brick by brick, I started analyzing the markets, I read about companies, their future prospects, the balance sheets, and was somewhat able to figure out which companies were able to pull off in the market even when the market was down. In addition to this, the Smallcase really helped me in picking a theme of stocks and I started heavily investing through smallcase.

Later, I started to trade actually (not actively anymore) which was again a foolish decision that I made. Since I was planning for long-term investment and my goals were totally in the future anticipation, trading was not my cup of tea.

Later, I bought my first US stock on the 8th again but seven months later - in October 2021. But I made a very conscious decision that I would never trade on the Nasdaq market and this investment is purely for the long-term and hence I am holding my US stocks.

I also applied for a lot of IPOs since 2021 was the buzz trend of IPOs. I had bid for Zomato, Glenmark, Policy Bazaar, SJS enterprises, Tatv Chintan Pharma, Devyani International, Nykaa, and much more. But I was fortunate only with Policy Bazaar and SJS enterprises alone and was allotted shares.

Later, I started with Mutual Funds. Yeah, I know I had reversed the cycle in my investment journey. Usually, people start with Mutual Funds and gradually incline towards the equity market. But I kind of back-pedaled: started with equity and then mutual. But I had my own personalized reasons for that.

But what did I fail with? - I was impotent to create an emergency fund (6X & 12X). I would dump all of my money once I get my salary keeping aside some amount to pay off my credit card bills and other miscellaneous expenses.

So to sum up, I am very glad that I got into this investment journey and I am at the very early stages and hopefully I get better in the coming days. The only regret that I have is I started late and it took me a few years to get better at investments.