I have been in the field of Investing since 1992. I can vividly remember the frenzy of the Harshad Mehta led Bull Run. During that period we  frequently bunked the morning class at St Xavier's College to see the previous day stock quotes. The paper was read back wards – from the quotation pages. By the time college ended the paper used to be in tatters and we were a few idea plus.Almost everybody had a connection to the big bull. While some body's uncle was in direct contact with him others said that their father's close friend was Harshad's  channel partners. My initial investment of Rs 30,000 tripled and making money in stocks appeared extremely easy. The story had to end and my investment, which consisted of Hindustan Motors and Reliance Petroleum, also went down 80%. By that time I had lost my entire capital as I was leveraged on badla.

My sense is that it takes years for a person to understand investing In addition to the time loss the probability of losing the initial capital is very high. Market men call it tuition fees and it is directly proportional to the amount you bring into the market. It is therefore recommended that new investors should start from very small amounts as what ever you put in is bound to be lost!

Investors can substantially scale up their learning curve by reading. It is important not to get dwarfed by the complex integration of financial arithmetic. CAPM, Weighted Risk and portfolio hedging are terms that never jump out from textbooks. It is essential to generate a broader stream of thought and to look at the bigger picture. Peter Lynch remains my favorite and I love to think the way he did. Young investors should concentrate on reading biographies of the wiser men in business.

Today there are numerous sites that focus on what to buy rather then why to buy. The focus of this web site www.theequitydesk.com is not on what to buy but why to buy? We have compiled a huge cache of information based on historical events and the biographies of the wiser men in business. Of course the only things that we learns from history is that we do not learns from history but still it is better to be approximately correct rather then precisely wrong.