From Coins to 25% In Equity At the Age Of 18: My Financial Autobiography

Below is my life story from a financial perspective. Before reading this, you might want to take a look at my short autobiography in my website’s about section to get a quick glimpse of what’s below and about some other events not mentioned here, including my programming journey.

Table Of Contents

• Childhood Interest in Coin Collection (4 - 5)
• Collecting, Trading Stationery(9-11)
• Making My First Profit From Cryptocurrencies (13.5 - 15)
• Trading Equities Using Investopedia Simulator (15.5 - 16)
• Earning Money By Doing In-game Micro transactions for others (15.5 - 16)
• Starting Equity Trading Using My Father’s Account (16 - 18)
• Starting Equity With My Own Account (18 - Present)
• Becoming Self Made Equity Lakhpati, 18

Childhood Interest in Coin Collection (4 - 5)

This is probably the hobby that paved the way for my interest in finance. While I mostly collected exotic Indian coins, I also did have some paper notes, and foreign currencies too.

Most of my coins came from buying it from beggars at a price higher than their face value.

This hobby was kinda expensive and required traveling to some potentially unsafe places. It was impossible for 4 year old me to sustain it, so I soon left it.

Below is the picture of notes from my collection. 4 Indian Rupee notes. 3x One Rupee and 1x of two rupees

Collecting, Trading Stationery(9 - 11)

I started collecting stationery at age of 9. By the age of 10, I had started taking my stationery collection seriously. I also introduced this hobby to my classmates, and it spread like fire. I also started trading stationery with them. I named this act "Soada", which is Punjabi word for "deal". I mostly traded stationery for non stationery items including food, money and others. I kept a written, signed bill of each item traded for just in case. I also introduced written form of communication in form of paper balls letters with some obscure words.

Some of my most notable trades were two pocket sized Oxford dictionaries for a soft drink, chips and some nuts. An obscure sharpener for cash, listening to stories of a classmate's father stationery shop from her. Pack 50 pens, 2 Rupee, each from a village student for cash. Mathematics table, formula notebook, which I wrote myself, for 15 sharpners.

I was specially fond of pencil sharpeners and pens. I had 227 pencil sharpeners, 150+ pens, 30+ erasers. Thefts were pretty common too, so I had "secret pockets" in my bags, coats which were carved out using sharpener blade. I also managed to convince some thieves to not steal my items, else I will complain them to our maths teacher, who considered me as her "favorite student" and gave me Smart and Cool :smile: on official report card.

There were also some ideological differences. For example, one rival turned trading partner collected pencil leads from wooden pencils by repeatedly sharpening it, which I, and maths teacher both, found valueless and waste but we didn't object. Another one was with many others who were so keen on displaying their collections publicly to almost everyone but I was opposed to this. Due to concerns of theft and whole class already knew this. But some show off was also necessary as form of advertising, so I kept my bragging tendencies to limited circle. I used to say, Why should I bend and look down , laugh on others instead of making others look up and they will notice automatically.

In addition to that, we did many other things including Pen fighting[^1], "experiments" with stationery, writing short reference books, throwing our stationery out of window on the porch and then rolling them down through water pressure. The one who managed to do this could keep all of them.

I stopped this hobby at age of 11 because it was getting way too expensive, thieves had left the school, our school was getting strict to the point that they confiscated my cash, expensive stationery. Though I got them back after my father wrote a note to them. And I also became favorite student of another maths teacher, which also helped, read more in my short-autobiography. I also had started focusing on programming and later finance. Though my stationery didn't go waste. I personally donated many to poor students in villages who passed an oral test, and still use some of the items.

Making Beer Money, 12.5 - 13.5

At the age of 12.5, I created a Paytm account with Mini KYC, and started earning through referrals, micro tasks, quizzes and some real money gaming.

I didn't really do real money gaming much as I knew that I often lost, except in one game in which I managed to earn around hundred rupees. I didn't do sports betting, rummy, poker as I didn't have enough knowledge, neither desire to gain it.

I must have earned a total 600-700 rupees overall, without any investment, but I then just stopped as the work to reward ratio was too low. But for me, the biggest feeling was earning something. I still remember that I playfully bantered with my classmates that I have already started earning, have more cash in my wallet than them, who had none.

I didn't share much about these platforms in my group, other than the Crypto currency platform, and Google Opinion Rewards, as many of these platforms were specific to India, and few required investments. And I used to say that, I will make sure that my group members don't have to pay a single cent from their pocket as a comparison to of other group admins or YouTubers.

Making My First Profit From Cryptocurrencies (14 - 15)

After learning programming for 1.5 years, at the age of 13.5, I created my own group for computer, cybersecurity related discussions, that gained over 100 members, and I started learning about finance, stocks, cryptocurrency.

At the age of 14, after I gained working knowledge of block chain, cryptocurrencies and related fields, I started searching for ways to implement my knowledge. I came across a platform named Stormgain which had a feature that would let you mine Bitcoin on their cloud platform for free. So I signed up there and started mining.

I was able to refer around 5 people in Sethi Free Hacking School, which increased my mining rate. Soon, I reached $10, the minimum withdraw limit, and withdrew my earnings to my trading account, there was no option to withdraw to bank account, crypto wallet. From that, I bought Matic USDT and made $13.

But sadly, I wasn’t able to withdraw the profit because I didn’t have legal documents, as I was a minor. After that, I just abandoned Stormgain, cryptocurrencies and started focusing more on programming, equities instead. Though still I did manage to make $105 profit in demo account with BTCUSDT and COMPUSDT

Trading Equities Using Investopedia Simulator (15.5 - 16)

Even though it was a demo account, I played safe and only bought securities which I would feel confident buying from my real money. I also bought some cryptocurrencies including Dogecoin, Ethererum, Bitcoin, but my main focus was on equities.

As of 2024-11-10, My abandoned account have 174 % profit, but it’s just a demo account, so I can’t really withdraw it.

Earning Money By Doing In-game Micro transactions for others (15.5 - 16)

As I shared in my previous article that why I am not a game developer and why I don’t play video games, I was safe from this “disease”. But many of my friends did, and they didn’t have much means to do in-game micro transactions as they were minors too.

I had already opened a mini KYC Paytm account using my father’s documents, as I mentioned above, and had knowledge of these things so I did micro transactions on their behalf.

Most of micro transactions I did were in video game named Free Fire. I would buy a Google Play Gift card using my Paytm balance and then share code with them. Sometimes, I also did direct top ups using Codashop.

Since Paytm isn’t a traditional bank, I couldn’t go to a bank to get money deposited. So, I would have to go to some mobile recharge shops, and later a friend, who would take cash, commission from me and send to my Paytm account. For this reason, I would charge some “commission” too.

My opening balance was around 1,500 rupees, but my closing balance, at the end of the year, was around 10,000 rupees. While I did loose around 500 as bad debts to two of my friends, I then stopped doing transactions for them. Overall, it was fun and profitable!

Below is a chat screenshot from one of my friend. Translation He: Hello, Harshit. Me: Yeah. He: Russian one. Me: Lol, yes. He: Do you have money in Paytm? 700? Me: Yes He: Okay I will send you a number, send it there. Me: Okay, send.

Starting Equity Trading Using My Father’s Account (16 - 18)

At the age of 16, I finally managed to convince my father to open a demat account for me. Earlier he was using multiple excuses including how he lost so much money, “what if step mother discovered this”, “focus on studies”, "invest in gold", and more. But when I showed him my demo account and demonstrated my knowledge, he agreed. After extensive research, I choose Zerodha as my broker, because it was a discount broker, that charges less fees than full-service ones. My father had initially opened an account on a full-service broker, but after I explained him charges associated with such brokers, he let me open account at Zerodha, using his documents.

Within six months, I managed to earn 10% profit by investing my savings into low expense ratio ETfs and few individual stocks.

During this age, I also started learning about XMR(Monero). Specifically, it's algorithm and implementation. I experiminted with it's testnet network, mining etc. As screenshot below shows, I managed to get collect 10 XMR(Testnet).

At age of 17, I started learning about various equity related strategies through paper trading, backtracking, refined mine one, moved from ETFs to individual stocks. Also reached around 16% profit.

Starting Equity With My Own Account (18 - Present)

From just a day next to my eighteenth’s birthday, I started preparing for creating my demat account, because I knew that it would be a lengthy process. I started by applying for pan card, which is necessary to create a bank and equity account.

As soon as my Permanent Account Number(PAN) card got delivered to my home, I went to bank with my father to get my account converted from a joint minor account to personal savings account. It took around 2 weeks for everything to get ready. After that, I created my own demat account at Zerodha. Surprisingly, my account got activated within 48 hours but now I had to transfer equities from my father’s account to my account. It was again very lengthy process that involved creating accounts on CDSL website, setting up beneficiary, verifying documents, but I again managed to do it on my own. Sadly, this wasn’t the end.

After the securities got transferred to my account, I faced yet another issue. The issue was that only number of shares were visible, but their book value wasn’t visible.

After researching on internet, I found that it’s a common thing. Now I had to manually enter the book value, date of purchase, amount of each share. I initially became a bit worried on how would I get that this data, as the shares were transferred from my father’s account. I went through bank statements, chat logs, screenshots and created a CSV file of all the transactions I could recover. To ease up the process, I wrote a simple Python script to automatically calculate average price of stocks and append it to CSV. But this wasn’t enough. Not only the dataset was incomplete, but it also had some small differences than book value of shares which were caused by various charges including brokerage, tax.

Fortunately, when browsing through my father’s demat account, I found a way to export old transaction history as CSV. I ran a modified version of my script and created a clean CSV file.

But still, around 65 shares still had discrepancies. The UI and docs were extremely unhelpful too. I ended up sharing my CSV to customer support and they fixed my issue within 4 days. Interestingly, they also admitted that there were indeed issues in backend.

It took around 2 months in all this but after that I could enjoy the fruit of freedom, my efforts. Soon, I also reached 25% in equity

Edit:1 Some "readers" have been arguing me that I should have sold and rebought the shares, instead of transfering them, as transfering is a long process. Well, If I had did what that then I would have to pay additional tax, and also I would loose that 20%. If I had sold them, then I would not be sitting on 25% profit and would not be writing this article. I thought it would be obvious hence, I did not clarify it.

Edit2: Within a month of writing this article, I was able to double my capital. I did this with combination of taking advantage of Largest Con of Corporate history by Adani, as reported by Reuters even though I heard this news after closing of market, different strategies and willpower. I am not going to hold Adani stock for a long time due to: extremely high PE; high equity to debt ratio; coal, cronyism etc. They, the readers mentioned in first edit, used to say "A dip*** kid came here to flex his 25% profit on 35K capital and how he saved on taxes ..." but I never cared much. If I had been arguing with them, I would have never reached here. Below is my P/L as of 2024-12-18. The small red is due to a stock is due to a single stock, but overall it's all green. I will just book profit and sell it ASAP, in fact I have placed a sell order already.

Becoming Self Made Equity Lakhpati, 18

Edit3: 2025-02-15. I am extremely happy to announce that I have become a Self made, Equity Lakhpati by the age of 18, just a 4 days before my final exams. By having investments worth 1,00,000 Rupees at market value.

But unfortunately, since today is Saturday, I can't do the trade today, but I have placed a limit order worth 9,000 which will get executed on Monday. I already have 92,000 so even if it doesn't become green that time, I would still be Lakhpati. So basically nothing can stop me. I will upload the screenshot on Tuesday, because I just can't control my laughter today and also after delivery so that people don't say I did an intraday trade.

Also it looks like my decision to not hold Adani was yet another right one. Currently Adani is down again, and it's due to coal as Times of India Reports. If I kept holding it, I would have not become a Lakhpati this soon.

Edit 4: 2025-02-17, turns out my another decision was correct, my premature celebration was not wrong. In the end, I had the last laughter, but it was not my last laughter. Not only my limit order got executed below the market price, but I am now sitting at 1% up in positions. I can technically sell it and be profitable, but I am going to wait for delivery. I have uploaded screenshot of positions on Linkedin. Despite the market conditions being bearish, Sensex down by 3,000 points, according to Times Of India. My profit % being down than earlier, 25, due to aggressive trading, I managed to reach my goal. It is an extremely difficult thing to reach this goal in bull run, but I did so that in bear run and at age of 18.

Edit 5: 2025-02-18. For those who like to keep a count, my yet another decision was correct. The market value of my portfolio is above 1L, even before opening of market, and below is a screenshot of my P/L as promised.

Edit 6: 2025-02-20, Adani stock is down again by 4.5% due to bribery charges by USA, as Times Of India reports. A bit of old news as I don’t consume news and I don’t have high expectations, unlike what high, artificially infalted, PE ratio of company says.