The Day my job lost me!!

Nope! This is not a grammatical error. Since I am not a pro- writer, please bear with me for my haphazard thoughts.

Chapter -1: Finding and Learning ropes

Ever since I was in high school, I had one goal in mind “I will not work for monthly Salary, I will make the salary work for me”. The idea was simple, find a thing that I am passionate about and work in and out of it for rest of my life. Sadly though, things didn’t turned out to be as simple as I used to think. Firstly, there was nothing like secured career, I discovered that all “paths of success” had their own ups and down. In fact, for every success story there were twenty odd failures, back out stories.

 So, one fine morning (while in second year in college), I decided to take on chartered accountancy course (CA).  I enrolled in the classes and got the balls rolling. At that point of time, I made a rule for studying various subjects; I would rather spend a day understanding the logic in the books than memorizing chapters. This was something I learned from people who have failed at least twice in CA exams.

Finally, first year of CA course came to an end and I cracked it. The trick worked! I didn’t need to burn night lamps to study;  all I have to do is just understand the logic and concept of whole chapter, note it down somewhere and it’s done. With my indigenous superpower, I decided to go ahead with the course.  Now, it was bit more difficult, because I had to attend a regular bachelor college (for the final year), attend those CA classes and do an internship as well.

Due to time constraints, it was pretty much clear that I can only do any two of above mentioned activities. My superpower had started to drain. In fact, I had started to feel that even my normal human powers were sucked out of me. Picture this, eight – nine hours of internship at chartered accountant’s office and will be followed by two-three hours of classes almost seven days a week. My boss was more like an reincarnation of a cruel king; in fact, he would rather point finger on city map and ask couple of interns to go there and do accounting stuff and collect payments. The clients were surprisingly more, if not less abusive. In fact, apart from income tax returns and few accounting standards, the most important thing I learned was to abuse in three different languages and five different accents.

Finally, after over fifteen months, I decided to move on to something that is more meaningful and keep me hooked. Now, my college was over and I had a bachelor’s degree, so I started to look for a proper job. Unfortunately, a real job was hard to get. In fact, I had to sit idle for three months.  One morning, I switched on to news channels and got introduced to stock markets. This looked pretty simple, buy a stock at lower price and sell when price rises. So, I went to local stock broker and opened an account. I had roughly Rs.2, 000 ($33) from my internship and started to look forward.

My broker told me that I can make tons of money with on-going markets. He told me tons of success stories and I met several people who were billionaires and used to trade daily. He gave me limit to trade ten times more than my initial investment. I started going to broker’s office daily to trade; in fact, I became one of the most familiar faces in the circuit. I actually started minting money, so much so, that I recovered my investment within five days.  I created a file in excel and created a chart for next five years. For next couple of weeks, everything looked like a dream. Now I started to withdraw my profits, to buy new stuff, those fancy shoes and that amazing watch.

Then one fine morning, I took a slightly risker stock (which everyone on the floor said would tank) and by the mid-day I actually started having losses and then to bring average prices down I bought more stocks. Magically though, it recovered by the end and I made some serious money. Broker told me that was one hell of decision and could have gone the other way.  The senior manager at the brokerage firm offered me a job, to take care of the client’s investments. In lieu, I would be paid commission. By this time, I had realized that I can tame markets (I was twenty one and hell lot cocky); I refused the job offer instead asked them to increase my limits and pay-out periods. For next few sessions, I was able to crack market with few losses. Sadly though, my get rich quick streak was ended one afternoon when markets crashed. I had put in a considerable amount of money. In fact, thousands of people lost money on that day. My broker asked me to pay money immediately (which I didn’t have); so I asked them to sell my stocks from my inventory and I will pay rest of money later.   Within next five days, I came back to square one; all the earnings had washed off. Later, that month I asked the brokerage firm manager, if he can get me a job. His bluntly said no. I was advised that I should try something else for some time and get in the market to break even losses.

So once again, I started hunting for job again…...