Wrong goal @Ajinkya.
The idea is to be curious and learn about many things. Hopefully, find something that you love to do and keep getting better at it. Not everyone can do everything, so if you find that you are doing something you aren’t good at, move on and not be married to it. If you keep doing this and getting better, and people around you want you to do well (being a decent human being), maybe someday, the goddess of luck will smile at you, and you make some money. Even if you didn’t make the money, you’d have done justice to your life.
Many people say that they love trading, almost everyone I speak to. But the question is, how good are you at it? I love playing music and basketball, but it doesn’t mean I can become a professional musician or basketball player and become financially successful.
I have said this before, trading isn’t just trading stocks; it is about trading your time. It is about trading your time to put your efforts in something that can give you the most outsized return with a risk profile that you can live with rationally.
Nikhil was a better stock trader than I was, so he continued trading while I attempted to build the Zerodha business when we started. If you track me on Tradingqna, you’d understand that I like interacting and building communities online, which is a skill more suited to build a business. This is how I have always been and hence the idea of Zerodha even came by.
It is almost impossible to become a billionaire in a lifetime just by trading stocks if you come from a middle-class family. The billionaire tag we get is because of the notional valuation of Zerodha. There aren’t tens of thousands of crores sitting in our bank accounts.
The valuation of Zerodha could go up and down very quickly based on market conditions. Hence both of us don’t take this billionaire tag seriously.
Of course, there are a few billionaire traders in developed countries who started with nothing. But most of them got to their first $10 to $100 million doing something else. To trade and make money, you need first to have the money.
What I said may not be the answer you were looking for, but I think this is the reality. And, of course, I might be wrong as well.