How I finally entered a $5 trillion money-making venture
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But it was while reading Swaminathan Aiyar’s column in this paper last week, in the context of the Indian stock market reaching the psycho-numerological landmark of $5 trillion market capitalisation, that I recalled the other line by the great non-Marxist, “Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.”
While Groucho’s observation wasn’t quite accurate—many of us do make money by doing some things we dislike because there are EMIs to pay, bad lifestyle habits to sustain, pointless things to acquire —he had hit upon a kind of money-making that middle-class boomers like me had ignored, even resisted, for a considerable part of our adult, earning lives: investing in the stock market and watch this potted money sprout more money. Theoretically, it allows me to step out of the usual pattern of earning money—in exchange for work, some of it undesirable—and watch it literally grow, thanks to some magic that I’m too much of a Muggle to understand (or want to understand).
“The Indian middle class has fallen in love with systematic investment plans (SIPs),” wrote Swami, “in which they have a certain fixed sum deducted from their salary every month and invested in a mutual fund. Amateurs generally perform badly in stock markets…. The best way is to systematically invest a fixed sum or proportion of salary every month… into a mutual fund and leave the choice of the portfolio to a professional fund
