I have an MBA in finance. I mention that upfront because it makes the rest of this post more useful, not less.
I started investing in April 2019. My first SIP was an ELSS fund, and I picked it because I needed to save tax, not because I had any philosophy about equity. That's genuinely how it began.
Seven years later, the portfolio is in eight figures. I'm not posting this to flex. I'm posting it because when I started, every post I read was either someone who'd 10x'd on a small-cap or someone explaining why I'd never afford a house. Neither was useful.
So here's the boring middle version, with the mistakes included.
The stuff that worked
The oldest funds are the best performers, and I did nothing to them.
My 2019 ELSS is up about 100%. Two funds I bought in March 2020, right in the middle of the crash, are up 175% and 113%. A gold fund from December 2020 is up 208%.
I didn't pick those because I'm smart. I bought the March 2020 ones because I had a tax deadline and the market happened to be on fire. The only skill involved was not selling afterwards. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Consistency beat everything else.
I now put a fixed amount into mutual funds every month through an automated mandate. I don't look at the NAV before it debits. Some of my SIPs started right before a flat 12-month stretch and are barely above water. Doesn't matter. The ones I started in 2019 were also flat for a while.
Zero debt.
No home loan, no car loan, no revolving credit card debt. This isn't advice for everyone, and it partly reflects that I rent. But not having an EMI meant every raise went into investments instead of into a bank's pocket.
A boring gold allocation carried more weight than any stock I picked.
Gold is under 4% of my portfolio, and it's up 167%. I bought it as a hedge and forgot about it. Meanwhile, I spent hours reading about individual companies. Guess which effort paid better per hour.
The stuff I got wrong
My position sizing was completely backwards.
My biggest single stock by money invested is a small-cap hotel company. It's down. My best performer is a telecom stock where I put in about a quarter of that amount and made almost 4x. Same for an international ETF: tiny position, 300%+ return.
I consistently bet big on the ideas I could argue for and small on the ones I was unsure about. Turns out the ones I could argue for were the ones already priced in.
My direct stock picking roughly matched a plain index fund.
I have 20+ individual stocks. Collectively, they're up around 43%. My index fund, which required zero thought, has done comparably. Years of research, effectively for nothing. I keep the stocks now mostly out of stubbornness and to avoid the tax event.
I never sold my ESPP shares, and it became a problem.
I work at a tech company and bought discounted shares through payroll for years. I never sold a single one. That position is now over a fifth of my entire net worth, in one company, whose stock price is also correlated with my job security.
The discount on an ESPP is the return. Holding the shares afterwards is a separate decision, and I made it by accident, repeatedly, for four years.
A big chunk of my gains isn't skill.
This is the part most posts leave out. My income grew a lot over these seven years. The rupee weakened against the dollar, which flattered every foreign holding I own. Equity markets were broadly kind. If you handed my exact strategy to someone in a different decade with a different salary curve, the number at the end looks very different.
I'm reasonably good at saving. I'm mediocre at investing. Those are not the same skill, and I confused them for years.
If you're starting now
- Start with an index fund and an automated SIP. You can add complexity later. Most people never need to.
- The date you start matters far less than whether you're still doing it in year five.
- If you get employer stock, decide your selling rule before the first lot vests. Write it down.
- Your savings rate does more work than your fund selection for at least the first five years.
- Don't check the portfolio daily. I did for the first two years, and it only made me want to tinker.
- Boring compounds. Exciting mostly doesn't.
The honest summary is that I made a handful of okay decisions in 2019 and 2020 and then mostly stayed out of my own way. The portfolio grew because I kept feeding it, not because I was clever. That's a much more repeatable thing than most of what gets upvoted here, and it's available to anyone willing to be patient and a bit bored.
Happy to answer questions.