Part A
During my childhood, my father’s office was 12km away from our house. I used to call my father every afternoon to get the chocolates/sweets I wanted. Every time I used to call my father’s office where the telephone operator used the call to my father’s cabin. Sometimes when he was not in his I was not able to convey my choice for the evening sweets. After a few years when mobile phones were booming in the market, we purchased a phone. On the basis of word of mouth, my father selected “Idea” as the network provider. Now it was much to communicate with my father every day. This was the first time Aditya Birla Group made an impact on me by making the communication easier. My father and other relatives in my family were trading in the stock market. Hence whenever any relative used to visit our home they used to discuss regarding their trading and investments while watching business channels. I was also fascinated with the stock market and wanted to give it a try. Since I was just 11 years old nobody allowed me to trade with real money. To get better insights regarding stock market I stopped watching cartoons and started watching business news channels, I left reading comic books and started reading business newspapers and annual reports of the companies in which my father had invested his money. Despite the fact that I was hardly able to understand anything I kept on trying to learn more.
Part B
After a few months, I started paper trading based on my views and analysis. Although at that small age it was more of speculation and guess and less of fundamental research. I used to always observe those stocks whose products we were using in our day to day life like Idea Cellular, HUL, Marico, Navneet, Colgate(P), etc.
Looking at my interest and wish in trading my mother allowed me to trade with real money in August 2007. My mother allowed me to trade only under the condition that trading should not affect my academics either should I run into heavy losses while trading. Since a violation of any of these conditions would result in a full stop to my trading, I was very cautious before my first trade with real money. Since the telecom sector was booming at that time and my family being using Idea network, being an 11-year-old boy, I thought of investing in Idea Cellular Limited. At that time, I invested almost 60% of the capital provided to me in Idea and the remaining amount was invested equally in 2 other stocks. Within 2 months before my 12th birthday in October 2007 I sold the shares of Idea with an outstanding return of 21% in a matter of 2 months which was equivalent to 2.5 years yield in fixed deposits. This really boosted my confidence to further explore the stock market, this incident also made my mother encourage my interest in trading. I further went on to explore fundamental analysis and technical analysis. I also explored various segments like equity, index and stock derivatives, currency and commodity derivatives. Today after 12 years form my first trade, trading is one of the major sources of my income. Currently, I am majorly involved in options trading with a major focus on learning and developing low-risk option trading strategies. I still wonder what would have happened if I didn’t have gone with my first “Idea”.