Why I stopped trading
I get asked often, why stop trading? Trading isn’t just trading stocks, It’s trading your time and efforts to do things, where the risk to reward is most in your favour. While I have stopped trading stocks actively, Zerodha is by far the biggest trade of my life.
Nikhil Kamath is a much better trader than me. When we started, idea was he would trade & I attempt to build Zerodha. If it didn’t work, I’d get back to trading. It did & Nik continues trading full-time. His trading profits the first 2yrs is how we could build without VCs.
The reason why we do what we do is that we believe that more Indians should back entrepreneurs by taking some risks. Investments that can create jobs & wealth locally, & can lead to more inclusive economic growth. Money lying idle in physical assets doesn’t help the economy.
Apart from enabling Indians to invest through Zerodha, we’re using most of our personal & business success to back entrepreneurs. We started Rainmatter in 2016 to help grow the capital market ecosystem by working with startups & doing whatever to help them.
It’s a bit clichéd but wealth can’t make up for bad health. We also partner with startups working to help Indians make healthier choices. With Rainmatter Organisation we partner for-profits & non-profits working on climate change problems & creation of livelihoods at the grassroots.
Free & open-source software (FOSS) is the main reason for the success of Zerodha. We are constantly looking to give back not just by helping FOSS projects & companies, but our tech team also open sources all learnings & many internal projects.
I don’t have term insurance because I have savings set aside to cover my dependents, which I cannot touch. This was possible only because I got supremely lucky, otherwise, almost everyone needs a term plan to ensure the dependents are protected.