The advantage of running a blog and doing some training is you meet people of various types, shapes and sizes. I meet people who have made immense amount of money in equity markets (upwards of Rs. 20 crores), people who are die-hard market timers (some have done well so somewhat debunking the theory that no one can time the markets), some SIP lovers – who have created good wealth in the past 10 years, and some who hate the equity markets. There are some who do not know the equity markets at all, and some who will vouch that wealth is created only in Real estate.

However there are 2 people who quite stood out in all these people I met.

One is a graduate of IIM and he argued with me (not in touch over the past 2 years) about investing in an index. He had obviously read about index investing. He would argue that about 100 years ago if you had invested in all the indices around the world..many stock exchanges would have closed down (and important ones too)…so indexing according to him was also not safe. Then he got into an argument about which index to choose – Sensex or Nifty. This happened sometime in 1999. Till the year 2007 whenever we met he would have some theory as to why not to invest. Most of his savings were in life insurance products or other savings products. To the best of my knowledge he had not invested at all but was working in the financial services industry.

Such guys convinced me that people could talk about something in their professional life but do something in their personal life.