Hello everyone
I see that a lot of people showcase their portfolios here on this website and share their learnings and insights. I wanna do that and have my little corner. And I really want to share my story.
My investing journey began nearly 10 years ago. After getting a Jio sim, I started using YouTube. I eventually came across Rich Dad Poor Dad book. I bought it and read it in December of 2016.
In January 2017, I set up an ETMoney account in my mom’s name and invested 50k in a mutual fund.
I initially wanted to go into real estate. That’s what the book encouraged. I was also watching Bigger Pockets around this time. But I quickly realised that what works in US doesn’t work here. You cannot pay the mortgage just from the rent money in India.
So I got into stock market. By the end of 2017, I had 4 to 5 Lakh invested in mutual funds. I had equity funds, balanced funds and debt funds.
I was transfering money from FDs and ULIP policies that my mom had to places of larger return.
I watched lots of Warren Buffett videos and other finance youtubers in 2017 and 2018.
We have a plot of land apart from our home. I wanted to sell it and invest that money in the stock market and make a living that way when I grow up.
I made a deal with my parents that I would get 1 crore when I got 18 years old. They didn’t do that. They didn’t trust me with that much money. So they made an excuse that I would get 1 L a month and they will give me money later in 2021 when they have it. That never happened but I kept getting 1 L a month or 12% interest on my promised capital starting September 2019.
Also in 2019, I got into direct equity, buying small amounts of HDFC Bank and Reliance Industries stocks.
I was mainly in debt funds when the pandemic crash happened because I was timing the market and believed the stock market was expensive. Another reason is that I was risk averse. This was hard earned money of my parents which was given to me and I did not want to lose it.
I started buying equity mutual funds on 3rd March and had invested 11 Lakh by 16th March. I had 14 Lakhs then and I didn’t invest any more, keeping the rest in short term bonds.
The market kept going down and I had a small panic attack or breakdown on 23rd March. That was coincidentally the day the market bottomed.
I was watching youtube channels such as Graham Stephan, Beat the Bush etc. I was also active in reddit forums. They were all negative about the recovery so younger me got influenced and I sold all my equity mutual funds in May 2020 for a profiit of 1.75 Lakh. I take full responsibility for that and have learnt my lesson.
I stayed in short term debt funds for a while and watched the stock market go higher and higher. Then towards the end of 2020, I started dabbling in individual stocks. I mainly bought cheap stocks such as Coal India, Rain Industries, Cupid, Cochin Shipyard, Rites, Manappuram Finance because I was influenced by The Intelligent Investor at that time.
I owned these particular stocks because they were the only attractive looking stocks I knew back then. In 2021 I came across PFC and REC from screener. They made immediate sense to me. Everyone was bearish on PSUs but I had no such bias and I liked them because of their extremely cheap valuations. So I bought them. I also bought two rice stocks - KRBL and Daawat. I sold other stocks and pretty much had a 4 stock portfolio. I was all in stocks by mid 2021.
2022 was bad for me. I was depressed and financially, my stocks were also down. I lost interest in stocks and didn’t even invest new money that I got monthly. I didn’t even do research apart from listening to concalls of my companies. My companies were the best so I didn’t need anything else.
Same mental rut happened in 2023. I did not invest money from Feb to August. One day in August of 2023, I checked the Kite app and discovered my net worth of over 1 crore. Those months of not investing on time cost me a lot of money.
I sold KRBL in November because it was not performing. My net worth hit 2 crore in December. LTFoods was getting expensive and PFC was much cheaper and going up. So I sold LTFoods in December at 220 rupees price.
I was regularly making 5 lakh, 10 lakh or 15 lakh in November and December. My head was full of it. I fell in love with my stocks. I did not need anything else.
Some other things that made me a strong believer : I did not believe that the Modi government could afford corruption charges so no phone banking like earlier times. I did not believe that management could siphon off money from the company. Also Vivek Kumar Dewangan of REC said that the company could grow profits at around 18% and stupid me believed him at that time. He retired shortly after and the company grew PAT at only 12%
PSUs also have a regulation where they have to give 30% of their profits which is used to fund government expenses. I loved it. Not only they gave 4 to 5% dividend yield, I could also expect the retained earnings to help increase the EPS by around 10-12% which is around nominal GDP growth.
I was heavily into FIRE : Financial Independence and Retiring Early at that time and these two were my retirement plan.
In 2024 I kept on buying each month and reinvesting my dividends at 400s range and at around 6 to 8 times earnings. The stocks and my whole portfolio was down around 25% on the day when Lok Sabha election results were announced.
Similar stocks such as IREDA and IRFC were over 30 times earnings. So that is why I didn’t sell and kept adding to them. I dreamt of them going to 18x PE and then I will sell. But that never happened. Both of their stock prices peaked in July and never came back and are still below that.
In October I came across Arman Financial. I liked it because it was growing much faster and had better return ratios. One thing that I really liked in Arman was that they raised equity at high PB causing the Book value to rise. This was absent in PFC and REC. I also realised the math ; Over the long term, i.e. 10 years, I will make much more money in Arman which might grow at 25 to 30% a year vs PFC and REC which might grow at 15% dividends included.
I did not want to sell my PFC and REC because I still believed in them so I took a loan from Zerodha Capital and bought Arman. I later soured on this because the loan tenure was only 1 year and that was not enough. So I sold Arman and paid off my loans.
Then in 2025, one day I was checking Zerodha Capital and they were now offering 3 year loans against securities. So I took one again. This time it was 40 Lakh.
In 2026 I was happy because PFC and REC were rising while the market was selling off. But later in May I came across some guy on Subtrack. I liked him and bought his portfolio service. I started buying the stocks that made sense to me from his pack. This time I sold PFC and kept on Arman. I later also added to Arman.
Then eventually now, around 40% of my portfolio is my stocks and the rest are his recommended stocks. I am satisfied with him so far. I won’t name him or his firm as this is my post and not an advertisement for him. I also paid off my loan because that would be too risky while investing in microcaps.
I will share my current portfolio but I won’t reveal his companies. That would be illegal and immoral.
Arman Financial - 26.21%
Emerald Finance - 7.95%
Nisus Finance - 5.53%
Five Star Business Finance - 1.15%
DP Abhushan - 0.40%
