A quick look into my stock portfolio, workout routine, and programming.

Stock Market

The first thing I did when I turned 18 was apply for a PAN card so I can open a demat account. Successfully I did and got it right after the 2020 market crash and was able to start investing when the market was in pre-recovery.

Started with day trading — like most people — but then slowly went to swing and then to long term. Now mostly focusing only on the long term and occasionally swing trading now and then.

Long term portfolio is easily divided into 50% active investing and 50% passive investing. In active investing, I only hold stocks of HAPPSTMNDS AND AMBUJACEM as of now. In passive, I hold two mutual funds — Taurus Ethical Fund and Nippon Pharma Fund.

The decision to buy Nippon Pharma Fund was solely due to the assumption that once vaccines come out the stock prices of most pharma companies will go through roof. And to some extent it did.

Taurus Ethical Fund was one of the only two broad market index mutual funds I could find that invested only in ethically good companies and does not invest in any companies that have significantly high debts or deals with alcohol or tobacco-related industries. In simpler terms, Shariah-complied-mutual-fund.

Portfolio grew from 35K in Jan to 99K in September and then settled at 91K as of Dec 31st. Here’s a full list of investments I’ve made so far :

What’s Ahead?

All of the investments I had so far are purely long-term and not planning to sell those for the next 10 years at the bare minimum. The great thing about investing long-term is you barely have to think about it. Furthermore, after a certain point of time, the rate at which your portfolio value goes up is exponential. Here’s a quick example:

• An average stock in the stock market fluctuates roughly 1-2% per day. For this case, let’s assume it’s 1 percent.

• Say you buy 1 stock in Reliance in 2017 at a price of 530.

• When your stock goes up by a mere 1%, you gain 5.3Rs.

• Say you didn’t sell the stock. And now in 2021, one stock of Reliance is valued at 2350Rs.

• So when your stock goes up by a mere 1% now, you gain 23.50Rs.

• That’s 4X of what you used to get in 2017.

• All that for just being patient enough.

Instead of going with the typical active or passive investing; I decided to merge ‘em both. As passive investing, invested in two different mutual funds in which one of them is broad market and the other is industry-specific. As for active investing, selected a few handpicked stocks and then invested heavily in them.

In terms of intraday trading, we have none. Although, still does some swing occasionally then and now.

Some no bullshit insightful informative YouTubers you should follow:

• Andrei Jikh (Crypto and Stocks) - beginner-friendly

• Patrick Boyle (Advanced finance) - intermediate level

• Millennial Money (Podcast by 4 best Youtube finance content creator) - beginner-friendly

• Graham Stephen - (Stocks and Real Estate mostly) - beginner-friendly.

• Meet Kevin (Finance and Policies related to it) - beginner-friendly

• marketfeed by Sharique Samsudheen (Stocks) - based in India - beginner-friendly

Powerbuilding

Have seen plenty of people who get to into lifting after a breakup. But that shouldn’t be the reason you join and that wasn’t for me either. And any growth you get through it can easily be credited to the person who broke your heart.

Using the hatred for them to motivate yourself is lowkey sad. The reason for your growth shouldn’t be your hatred for some stranger. And more often than not, these are the same people who join the gym because of a breakup are usually the one who stops lifting once they get into a new relationship. And the cycle repeats itself again.

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” – Socrates

Started as the 14-year-old kid who secretly did pushups in his room. But now into full-on trying to hit 165KG deadlift max at least in the next 6-8 months. Skipped a lot of details in between. Didn’t have much passion for the gym until one day I started going and once you start seeing those noobie gains blow up; you knew at that moment there’s no going back.

A few months later, saw some dude named David Laid or something’s transformation video and got so inspired. Started reading research papers, forums, anything and everything about muscle building.

But now focusing more on powerlifting and bulking ever since got selected for the college powerlifting team and to compete in the upcoming VTU powerlifting competition. As of this writing, measurements are:

Workout Routine:

Don’t wanna completely stop bodybuilding. So hybrid of both — Powerbuilding where you focus primarily on strength gains and the size gains follows.

Some no bullshit insightful informative YouTubers you should follow:

• Jeff Nippard - intermediate level

• More Plates More Dates - intermediate level

• Greg Doucette - beginner-friendly

Programming

In terms of improvement in coding skills, it was pretty low compared to recent years where I was able to dive into at least more than 2 or 3 languages. This year was primarily focused on Dart and Flutter. Built a small startup around it although it didn’t work out as expected, we were still able to profit more than we put in.

One of the main drawbacks of me when it comes to developing an app or building a startup is I rarely outsource the task to a third party. Just because you can do something; doesn’t mean you should. I suck at any form of designing task — logo designing, UI designing, and anything similar to that. But I still end up trying to do this when I could have easily got someone else to do it and then focused more on the part where I’m actually good at, ie, writing code to develop the UI and the backend. So from next year onwards, planning to outsource as much of menial task to third party service.

Update: A few days ago, met a few people in university who wanted to develop a flutter-based portfolio app for companies. A group of almost 6-7 people trying to develop this app. Decided to join them and now started working on it.

What’s Ahead?

All though haven’t made much progress in coding this year. Tried twice to finish CS50 by Harvard twice but still didn’t complete it due to lack of proper discipline. Hopefully, have to finish CS50: Introduction to Computer Science and then CS50: Introducing to Artificial Intelligence with Python.

Apart from this, some of the other achievements I’d like to see is to get my first seed funding for an app I develop from an actual investment firm — not from relatives or family members. And a well developed github profile.

Special Shoutouts

Rabeeh

If I had to describe Rabeeh in one sentence it’d go something like this, “Whatever programming language I wanted to learn, Raby has learned it 3 weeks ago, pushed a project in GitHub 2 weeks ago, and is currently working on at least 2 prototypes using that language.” The sheer determination of this man is beyond words.

Raby is the type of person who would take a job in languages he doesn’t know and then dive deep into the darkest corner of Google to learn and finish this project.

Personally, without this man my programming and finance skills wouldn’t be where it is now.

Moinu

If you need to know anything about bodybuilding, Moinu is the go-to person.

• Moinu doesn’t listen to bro science when it comes to bodybuilding.

• Moinu doesn’t listen to ill-informed Instagram posts.

• Moinu listens to types of people like Jeff Nippard and so.

• Moinu reads research papers on muscle hypertrophy before giving advice

• Moinu is fact-based.

• Be more like Moinu.

Apart from bodybuilding, Moinu participates in Stock Market and is also a programmer. And has been featured in Asianet News for developing a motion-detecting CCTV camera while he was in his 10th.

“Imagine where you’d be in 5 years if you didn’t stop whatever it is you’re doing now.”