How it all Started

It was the summer of 2003 and I was still in my last teen…

As an intern at Wipro, there were exactly two expectations from me:

1. Thou shall reach office before 9 AM and shall not leave office before 6:30 PM
2. Thou shall not Sleep in office …..

Spend some time studying about various web technologies online ignoring the fact that there was no computer allocated to me, there were 3 of us sharing the same computer….

Do whatever you feel like except sleeping, except browsing and except talking….. So this left very few options for me…. day dreaming, Introspection, coffee and still Sleeping (sometimes covering face with books or notes…. and sometimes hiding under the desk :)

One thing that I really liked about the company (or at least the promoter) was that Mr Premji, Chairman (who was then also the richest man in India) used to stand in the cafeteria queue(once right behind me) himself waiting for his turn to pay Rs: 18/- for the South Indian buffet lunch (Unlimited :)) [It felt like there was no need to be rich]

One of my companion who was a senior intern (a post graduate appointed as a 6 month intern for the second time) had a relatively busy schedule….his job involved noting the latest stock price of Wipro Infotech from NSE and BSE and updating it on the official Wipro website every couple of hours….
This dude was priviledged and had a sense of pride .... Specially because he had access to the lab, which housed the client machine that was used to connect to a server which intern remotely connected to the main server that hosted the Wipro website…. huh

For the first few days, I just wondered why couldn't they write a script (once and for all….) to fetch live stock prices of Wipro from NSE and BSE websites and automatically update them on Wipro website (not every 2 hours, but perhaps every few seconds)
Instead of hiring a full time intern to do this manually. I used to wonder what Value he brought to the company, leave aside me whose job was but just to observe and wonder, after all….
It was however good in the sense that it created a job for one more person, made one more bachelor eligible for marriage….and perhaps helped one more man(family) make a living…. :)

Blessing in disguise: my companion decided to delegate the work of noting the stock prices from NSE and BSE websites to me….. Off course, this meant giving the machine and web access to an untrusted party…..i.e.: me :)

I soon began to check stock prices of various other companies (whichever came to my mind), like Infosys and Satyam as they were Wipro's natural competitors……Bata, as I was wearing Bata shoes, Britannia, as dad worked at Britannia, Union bank, as mom worked there….Reliance, because everyone knew this one…..ICICI, because I had seen it in the ads ... and so on…..

In no time, I was tracking over 40 companies and checking their prices at least 40 times a day….. Yes, that's 1600 refreshes!
It was time for lots of stupid questions and stupid guesses….like "higher the stock price, more prosperous the company :)",
"Cheaper the stock price, smaller the company and hence more potential for growth :)"
(I still remember a stock (sri cement ltd, not sure if I am recalling the name correctly ) which was trading at 20 paisa, huh….that's less than half a cent…one that I had decided to make my fortune with :))

I explored and found out the difference between NSE and BSE, nifty and sensex… and imagined answers to the rest of the silly questions myself...
I soon started tracking various company announcements, results, charts, shareholding pattern and what not (most of which, *correction* actually, pretty much all of which obviously went over my head)….But I enjoyed the pride in opening this stuff (and faking understanding of it) in front on several other engineers who were equally illiterate/dumb in finance, however not as smart :)

I quickly followed the activity by studying stocks in my dad's portfolio, most of which were held for 15 years or more….some like HDFC and HDFC Bank had grown 10, 20 or 50 times and made him a fortune...... while several others had ceased to exist… (a surprising observation was that some of the small commodity stocks had lingered around pretty much the same price levels through these 2 decades)

With my rapidly growing interest….In no time, there was a third expectation set for me as a summer intern:

3. Thou shall not access the NSE or BSE website from office :)

So I obviously got back to my desk, and this time I had more pronounced day dreams…dreams of making lots of money and being rich…
As I spent more time away from the markets and refreshing stock prices, pondering about what this was all about...I began to realize that there was something missing, something incomplete in the story that I had understood in the last few days……

One thing was sure, that all of Investing was certainly not just about the stock prices and stock tickers….. There had to be something more to it… something more fundamental or at least something differentiating…. Something other than just buying / selling shares and the moving prices…. The thought kept bothering me for a long time…on and off…..until I met Uncle Harish (more later) ….

Meanwhile, in weeks and months that followed, I enjoyed refreshing(F5!) the stock prices and tracking various of them….

Before my internship at Wipro was over, I already had a Virtual Portfolio at MoneyControl, had setup my savings, demat and trading account with HDFC Bank and had convinced mom for a partnership and for sponsoring me with the starting capital…. :)

Mom's are always like that…they can't say NO…..at least not the first time you ask for something….. My mom for a change, continued to fund me with more capital every time I asked for a little more…expressing opportunities and my expansion plans.... After all, she had been a banker for 25 years !

During the course of the semester that was to follow.... while most of my friends spent time taking extra classes, playing and going out..... I often found myself in banks, getting IPO applications, reading red herring, writing cheques and appling for the IPO's that season...

Coming back to college, I realized that coping up with engineering was only going to be all the more difficult now…..