Ali Hasan
Meet India’s Youngest Billionaire : Nikhil Kamath
Today we will be talking about one of India’s youngest billionaire who achieved the milestone at the age of 34. Today we will be talking about Nikhil Kamath who is the co-founder and CEO of the stock trading platform Zerodha.
He achieved this milestone as he was included in the Forbes India Rich List with his brother and co-founder, Nithin. In October 2020, the Kamath brothers joined Forbes List with a combined wealth of $1.55 billion, as 34-year-old Nikhil was named India’s youngest new billionaire.
He started India’s largest stock trading brokerage platform in 2010 with his brother. His journey began when he dropped out of school at the age of just 14 to play chess.
He embarked on a two-year chess career, playing at both a national and international level. “Chess teaches you how to work under a structure in a system, but yet try and be creative within that system,” he told CNBC. “Nobody was going to hire me without a college degree, so I had to do something that didn’t require one.”
He has a habit of reading books and is a bookworm. He owns more than 500 books and estimates he reads 1-2 books each week. He started trading at the age of 17. According to him, “I had an active interest in stocks that had been inculcated by my father and brother who were already investing at the time. And once you start making a little bit of money trading, you get more interested, and it has continued ever since.”
“The great thing about trading is there is no ceiling. If you’re a good trader you can buy a larger amount and if you’re continuing to make money you can scale and scale and scale. You’re not limited to many things and I think that was very attractive to me.
Also, the fact that a job in trading doesn’t require any minimum qualification. Anybody can study the financial markets, you can read up online, you can buy books about different systems and methodologies of trading and investing and become a good trader on your own.”
Nikhil Kamath is also the co-founder, with his brother, of True Beacon, “an ecosystem of proprietary investment products, portfolio management & advisory, capital markets services and tailored programs for strategic investors focused on India’s public and private markets.”
He started the stockbroking firm due to high trading fees imposed on transactions back in his early days. He said in an interview, “The problem back in the day, I’m talking about 11 or 12 years ago, is cost was very high. Brokerage fees were incredibly high in India”.
“And for a full-time trader, there were many barricades or barriers one had to cross before he could actually be profitable in any consistent kind of manner.” So the Bangalore-born brothers set to work, using their savings to build a simple and affordable brokerage platform for everyday investors.
In 2010, Zerodha — a combination of “zero” and “rodha,” the Sanskrit word for barriers — was born. Today, unlike most start-ups, the company hasn’t taken on any external investment.
Zerodha has grown through word of mouth as the appetite for investments beyond gold and property has grown in India. But in 2020, all that changed during the pandemic. At the height of lockdowns, the company doubled its registered users to more than 4 million.
“The pandemic has been good to us, which is a strange thing to say. People had a lot more time, people were at home and, unfortunately, in many cases, they were in a position where an alternate income could have been very useful,” he said.
I think if you can learn anything from him then you should learn the fact that if you truly want something then please don’t waste your time doing what the masses want you to do. Immediately do what you want and stop doing everything else. But don’t just drop out without any solid plans either. Plan effectively and efficiently.
