I just realised I would have been worth crores today had I persisted for 112 more days. Let me tell you the story of how I was 112 days away from ₹9.9 crores and what I learned from it.
A Conversation
I found this out when I was talking with an old friend, Vyshak, after years.
Back in 2015, or 2013, when we were both younger, and I was still in a steady IT job, I’d introduced him to stocks. I stopped investing in stocks when I left my job. I had to sell it all because of the new career I setting off on.
But Vyshak kept going. He bought stocks every month, putting aside whatever he could from his government salary. Steadily, without drama. A small portfolio of companies that he managed himself. It had grown over the decade to about ₹85 lakhs. Sticking through ups and downs, a habit held onto long enough.
I felt genuinely proud of his achievement. I felt like I had some small part to play in. Okay, a “tiny” part.
Anyway, the conversation made me open my trading app. I hadn’t even opened it once in the last two years. I do get notifications on WhatsApp occasionally. Portfolio up, portfolio down that I ignore.
There Was One That Stood Out
That evening, I opened the app. I was looking for a particular stock that my friend was talking about.
While I was there, I went through some of the purchases I had made two years back. Some 10 or so companies I hadn’t thought about in years. ₹10,000 worth of stocks I had forgotten about. Of that, there was one that stood out.
It stood out because in my own order history, there were many attempts I had made from 2023 to buy that stock, the timestamps, and the prices. I couldn’t buy one then because no volume of trade was happening. I opened up the company’s page to see if there was ever any movement in it since.
I went back to my order page. I came back to the stock page. I looked again.
My orders showed a limit price of ₹3.21 for that order I had placed in 2023. The current price of the stock on my screen had too many digits in it. I counted them. I counted them again. I checked that I had opened the right company. If there was any typo. I went back to the order history. Came back to the price. Went back. Came back.
I Did the Math
I opened the price chart.
There was a single spike. Not a gradual climb, not a trend. But a straight up vertical line, in October of 2024, where the price went from roughly ₹3.53, where it had been frozen for years, to ₹2,36,250. SEBI had mandated a special call auction for price discovery on October 29, 2024, and in a single day, the stock moved by something in the region of 6.7 million %. It briefly became India’s most expensive stock, overtaking MRF.
I did the math. I had been trying to buy 100 shares at ₹300 total. At the peak, those same 100 shares would have been worth roughly ₹3.3 crores. I’d been trying for 300 shares. That would have been close to ₹9.9 crore.
I couldn’t sit still in my chair with that number in my head. Can you?
I walked to and fro in my house. For minutes at a stretch. I couldn’t sit.
I felt equally giddy and gutted. One didn’t cancel the other out.
I also felt proud, elated and joyful.
Back Then
You see, since I left my steady-paying IT job in 2015, I frankly didn’t have any cash to invest in stocks. While I was working and had a salary, I was investing every month.
Next, it was in 2023 when I had some freelance work that I had some spare cash to invest. After a decade, I reopened a trading account, this time with a low-fee platform, Groww.
My strategy this time was dividends. I had no salary coming for almost a decade. I was entirely dependent on my parents. I wanted to funnel whatever I could spare to buy stocks that would pay me dividends every year. That was the goal. Not glamorous. Just some passive, predictable income so that I can continue building my career as a writer and filmmaker.
Thus, dividends.
The Method
The goal was extreme to the point of absurdity: find stocks where the annual dividend paid exceeded the share price. If a stock cost ₹100 and paid ₹100 a year, I wanted that. It was naive. But it was what I needed at that point.
The methods I employed to find such companies were crude. I scraped stock exchange data myself with duct-tape scripts, manual joins, programs, spreadsheets and whatnot. I didn’t know a website like Screener existed at the time, a site that would have done most of it in minutes. I was that out of touch with stocks.
Anyway. I got it to work. One company stood out in my duct-tape spreadsheet. Elcid Investments. ₹3 per share, paying roughly ₹10 in annual dividends. I checked the numbers again and again. ₹100 in. ₹300 out every year. A yield of more than 300%. The highest in my entire spreadsheet. And there I thought my goal for 100% was absurd.
The numbers checked out. So I placed the orders. But it didn’t get fulfilled.
112 Days
You see, I didn’t understand what volume was back then. My orders weren’t getting fulfilled because there wasn’t any trading happening with that stock. It was a penny stock.
The app placed the order. No one was selling. My order lapsed at the end of the day. The next morning, I placed a higher bid, but none sold; the order lapsed. I placed the order again. And again. Not for weeks. But for three months. From January to March of 2023.
Eventually, the exhaustion won. I realised I was wasting my time and I moved on to the next stock that my duct-taped spreadsheet had spit out. Then the freelance work ended. The money stopped. And I stepped away from trading altogether. I didn’t open the app for the next two years.
Precisely 112 days after I had placed my last order for Elcid Investments, 2,000 of its stocks went on sale for ₹3.21. I just wasn’t there to see it in time.
What the Chart Told Me
What the chart told me when I finally saw it today, was not that I had lost something.
But that I had been right.
My filter was crude. The tools were duct-taped together. I didn’t understand volume. And yet, what I had found was genuine.
Elcid was chronically, extraordinarily undervalued. It held a significant stake in the company Asian Paints. The market price had been frozen at ₹3.53 for years while the actual value of its assets bore almost no relationship to that number. When SEBI forced a price discovery event, the market acknowledged what had always been there. My spreadsheet had seen it. My instinct had seen it.
I know that the right decision that wasn’t executed is the same as a wrong one in terms of the results, money, and its effects. The order didn’t fill. I didn’t make the crores. So you are right in asking in what sense I was right.
That’s a fair question. I’m not going to pretend I am right.
But that is not the question I’m asking myself right now.
Why Did I Stop?
What I’m asking is this. Why did I stop?
Not the surface reason. The burned out was real. The sales volume wasn’t there. My freelance money ran out. Life continued. All true.
But the interior reason is harder to look at.
I mean, I knew the target company my duct-tape spreadsheet had spit out was correct. ₹3 in ₹10 out every year in dividends. The maths was correct. I wasn’t hallucinating that. I could spare ₹300 to keep placing the order. But I didn’t. Why?
It Didn’t Feel Like Fear
I think I have known the answer in some form for a while now. My friends have pointed it out to me before. What I didn’t understand was how quietly it was operating in me until today, when I was sitting with this chart.
And it was fear. Fear of being wrong.
This fear never made any big announcement. That is what made it so effective. It didn’t say, “I am fear! And I am stopping you. Buhahahaaa…” It says sensible things. It says, “This order isn’t filling anyway, maybe it’s not worth the effort.” It says, “There are other stocks. Don’t be so obsessive.” It sounds like pragmatism. It sounds like rest. It sounds like moving on.
Looking Back
I don’t even know exactly when this fear entered me. It wasn’t there in 2015 when I boldly left my steady-paying IT job to set out on a course as a writer and filmmaker with no contacts or connections in the industry. Fear didn’t exist in my dictionary then. I trusted then in something larger than me.
Looking back now, I can perhaps trace the point of entry of this thing called fear to the aftermath of my first feature film, Munnariv.
I made it with everything I had. I believed in it. I believed it would see me through. Start my career. The result of 4 years of study and hard work.
And when the response came back, it wasn’t what I’d hoped. It wasn’t a dramatic failure. People who watched the film appreciated it. It was more of a non-event. Nothing happened. No one wanted to buy it. The doors I expected to open didn’t.
The Shift I Didn’t Notice
And somewhere since, without my awareness, something shifted. A thought settled. One I couldn’t have told you was there if you’d asked. “Maybe I can’t trust what I believe. Maybe my judgment isn’t right. Maybe instinct will let me down.”
It just stayed behind the scenes, making me cautious. Making me take decisions sensibly, pragmatically. Who can say no to that? What is wrong with sensible, pragmatic decisions, right?
The Cheque
For years, I used to carry, in my purse, a cheque written out to myself. For the sum of ₹2 crores. The financial freedom I am working towards, so that I can continue doing what I love. I still believe in what that promise represents. But I had stopped fully trusting my own ability to find my way there.
Looking at this stock chart, I realised the cheque had almost arrived. Had I stuck through and bought those 300 shares, then it would have right now been worth over ₹2 crores.
That cheque was a promise. Not through luck. Through my own method, however crude, however duct-taped. My instinct was correct, and it had found something. The fear was what stepped in between.
I’m Not Saying This Proves Anything
I’m not saying the fear was entirely wrong. I’m not saying every instinct should be trusted without question. I know survivorship bias exists.
Elcid was one call among many. Some of the other stocks that my spreadsheet had spit out performed as hoped. Some didn’t. One potential right call doesn’t prove everything. That is not the argument I am interested in building here.
What I’m saying is simpler. There was something operating in me, guiding me, below the level of my awareness.
Which is not to say the ache I feel is not real. But alongside that is the identification that my instinct was right. The method, for all its crudeness, was always guiding me in the right direction towards my desires. Perhaps even right now.
Sitting With It
I’m writing this down because I needed to get it out of me and look at it. I still don’t know exactly what all this means.
Some of what happened was circumstance. Some of it was timing. Some was fear.
I am not the person who was 112 days away from ₹9.9 crores but didn’t. I am the person who saw something real with his duct-tape tools, who placed the order again and again because the instinct was correct, who let fear speak in a reasonable voice and took it for wisdom. And who is now, at this moment, sitting with all of it and finally understanding what it was.
That I can trust in something larger. The instincts, life, choices and where it is all leading me. That I am at the right place at the right time doing the right thing every time. Even the gutted feeling of being so close and the giddiness of the same.
And so are you.
