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

This article was originally published on my website.

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.

Childhood Interest in Coin Collection (2010 - 2011)

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.

Making My First Profit From Cryptocurrencies (2021 - 2021-06)

At the age of 15, 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 my programming group, 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.

Trading Equities Using Investopedia Simulator (2021-06 - 2022)

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 (2021-11 - 2022-12)

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 opened a mini KYC Paytm account using my father's documents, 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!

Starting Equity Trading Using My Father's Account (2022 - 2024)

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" 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.

Starting Equity With My Own Account (2024 - 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!

#autobiography #equity #success #childhood #finance #coin-collection #coins #zerodha