How Manu Manek aka Black Cobra went from college trader to market marauder

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Black cobras are highly feared in India, even in parts where the snake is a fairly common sight. While their potent neurotoxic venom, which can cause paralysis and respiratory failure, is an obvious reason, their darkness imbues them with an extra layer of lethality.

Indeed, the Hindi phrase “kala naag" more accurately conveys the dread they invoke. That a mere stockbroker could be dubbed Black Cobra then tells the story of how dangerous Manu Manek Mundra, the man given that infamous title, must have been. Born into a middle-class family in Calcutta in the 1940s, Manek started his trading career while still in college, eventually graduating as a full-blown broker.

His modus operandi was the same as that of countless others who flourished through the 1970s: manipulate the markets in the absence of any effective regulation. This was the era before the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) was set up in April 1988. Its predecessor, the Controller of Capital Issues, the designated regulatory authority for the Indian securities market, saw itself primarily as responsible for overseeing the issuance of capital by companies and was generally disinterested in what they did after that.

Manek started his shenanigans on the Calcutta Stock Exchange, which in the 1970s was rife with such manipulators. He made his initial money by cornering stocks of companies with low trading volumes and driving up their prices. Eventually, he would dump them on gullible investors suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out).