My journey
A broking floor in 2006 to a registered research practice
I did not enter the financial markets knowing where they would take me.
I started my career with a job in a broking firm in 2006. Two years later, I witnessed one of the biggest financial crises of our generation.
I didn’t know it then, but those experiences would eventually shape my career, my research philosophy, and even the book I would write.
This is not a story of overnight success. It is a story of learning, uncertainty, mistakes, persistence and the journey of building something of my own.
Everything was red. Every screen, every day, for weeks.
I was new. I had joined a broking firm, Reliance Money, soon after my graduation, and I had opened my first demat account there. I did not fully understand what I was watching. I only knew that something very big had happened.
Around me, everyone was panicking and selling.
I held a few stocks myself, and my first thought was the same as everybody else’s. Get out.
I did not get out.
I want to be accurate about why, because the flattering version of this story is not the true one. It was not conviction in what I owned. It was two things. The first is that I was young and had only just started earning, so there was not much left to lose. The second is that I had been reading — not valuation manuals, but books on market psychology, and books about what people went through in the market. I knew about the dot-com bubble. I knew the market had come back from it.
That is what kept me still. Not analysis. History, read in advance.
One idea came out of those weeks, and I have been saying it ever since. There is a difference between a company going bad and the whole world going down. If something is wrong with the particular company you hold, that matters, and you act on it. If the decline is driven by a temporary global event rather than a deterioration in the underlying business, the impact may fade with time.
Most people treat the second as though it were the first. That single confusion does more damage than a bad stock pick ever does.
And I made my own mistake that year. It is still the one I think about. I held, and I did not add. I sat through the whole thing without buying any more of it.
Looking back, the 2008 crisis taught me something that no textbook could have taught me. Markets don’t always move as we expect, and having an investment is not the same as having the conviction and discipline to manage it. Sometimes, the biggest lessons come from the decisions we don’t make.
The interest was there from the beginning — the broking floor was my first job, not an accident. But a market is an uncertain thing to build a career on when you have only just started earning, so the steadier route won for a while. I took the corporate job, spent a spell at a technology firm, and kept the research going in whatever hours I had.
The interest never moved. I just stopped being paid for it.
Then I joined a firm that writes global research reports, and that is what brought it back. Doing research as the work rather than as the hobby showed me what research could actually be, and I started pushing much harder at it.
The problem was time. I was out in the morning and back in the evening. Doing the analysis by hand, on paper, one thing at a time, was not possible on those hours.
The cost was specific. There were things I needed to look at, at the moment I needed to look at them, and I kept missing them. Not because I did not know what to look for. Because I was not there.
Fortunately, I am good with Excel.
So I built something for myself. I had a problem and I had the tool, and that was the whole of it. No plan, no product, nothing to sell. Initially I developed it to understand option chain data more effectively, and I used it that way for a couple of years.
Then I shared it with friends, and the friends are what turned it. They used it, they liked it, they gave me feedback, and they told me to put it in front of other people. Their argument was one I already believed: plenty of people hold a job and cannot sit through the whole session, the charts, all of it, every day, and they still want a real view of the market.
So I put up a page and gave the file away. I left the data source open so anyone could bring their own and set the analysis up the way they wanted. I used YouTube so people could find it.
A spreadsheet and a YouTube channel. That was the whole of the business.
What started as a simple Excel-based tool to simplify my own market analysis gradually became something much bigger. Over time, this small initiative evolved into GeniAnalysis — an option chain analysis platform designed to simplify complex market data and help users understand market activity better.
The idea was simple: simplify analysis, make data more meaningful and help market participants make informed decisions.
The name came from a genie. You rub the lamp and it grants what you asked for. I wanted the analysis to arrive like that. Ask, and it is done, quickly. Genie and analysis. GeniAnalysis.
Then the question people asked me changed, and it took me a while to see how much it had changed. It stopped being “can I have the tool” and became “what do you think about this?”
Those are not the same question. Providing research-based buy, sell or hold recommendations to the public in India requires the appropriate regulatory registration. Having worked in the research industry, I understood the responsibility that comes with it.
Then 2020 happened. The COVID crash was 2008 again. Despite twelve years of experience, the same panic returned.
It made me realise how easily investors forget the lessons of the previous crisis.
Leaving a stable career is never easy. In 2020, I decided to step away from the security of a regular salary and build something of my own.
There was no guaranteed outcome, no established business and plenty of unanswered questions. But I wanted to turn my years of market experience and research into something meaningful.
It was a decision driven by conviction, not certainty.
After years of experience, research, experimentation and learning, 2024 became another important milestone in my journey.
I became a SEBI Registered Research Analyst.
For me, this was more than a professional achievement. It represented a commitment to building a formal research practice based on responsibility, discipline and transparency.
It was another step towards the vision I had been working on for years.
After spending nearly two decades in financial markets, I realised that understanding markets is not just about charts, indicators or predictions.
It is equally about patience, discipline, investor behaviour and the ability to deal with uncertainty.
I had started writing a different book in those years, and I threw it away. It was going to be about technical and fundamental analysis — how to run the analysis, how to scan. Everyone is writing that book, and my own tool already did most of it in a few clicks. After watching the same panic twice, I knew the book worth writing was the other one.
These experiences eventually inspired me to write Uncertainty Gives Returns. The book reflects many of the lessons the markets have taught me over the years. It is about understanding uncertainty, managing expectations and developing the right mindset towards investing.
The analysis is about twenty per cent of it. The other eighty is mindset.
Uncertainty does not always mean opportunity.
Markets are unpredictable. Analysis can help us understand possibilities, but discipline and mindset determine how we respond to them.
From starting at a broking firm in 2006 to experiencing market cycles, building research tools, establishing GeniResearch and becoming a SEBI Registered Research Analyst, every phase has taught me something.
I don’t believe in having all the answers. I believe in continuous learning, disciplined research and respecting market uncertainty.
There have been good decisions, mistakes, difficult phases and moments of doubt. But each experience has added another layer to my understanding of the markets.
If there is one thing this journey has taught me, it is that markets will always remain uncertain. What matters is how we learn, adapt and respond.
That is also the thought behind my book, Uncertainty Gives Returns.
The journey continues.