The wit and wisdom of Raamdeo Agrawal

Chairman & Co-founder, Motilal Oswal Financial Services

Raamdeo Agrawal has decades of experience in the stock market and is widely followed across the investment community for his wisdom and ideas. We speak with him to understand how he grew as an investor, who his role models have been and what his investment framework is. We also speak with him about his greatest investing lessons and takeaways for investors. Given the brilliant insights of this interview, it should find a permanent place in your stock-market toolkit.

Please share with our readers your journey in the investment field. What made you interested in it?

I completed my chartered accountancy in 1983. I have always been a voracious reader – of first newspapers and then magazines and fiction. In the 80s, I started reading fiction on high finance. I was also auditing several big companies. That expanded my mind and I got excited about entrepreneurship. When I passed out, I had no capital of my own. So, I did equity research for two years and that became my building block for coming to the stock market. I realised that just working as an analyst won’t help, so I took the plunge into becoming a sub-broker. I had many contacts and knew everything about the market; only that I didn’t have capital. So, I had to find a business model where you don’t need capital. And it should be a seller’s market, meaning that you are needed. So, even if you don’t have a name, people will take your services. We were among the few professional CAs in the market at that point in time. There were a lot of questionable practices in the market, so we brought a professional set-up. We started giving research; we started serving the clients round the clock. So, that’s how we started. It took me four-five years to learn the ropes.