Be disciplined and get rich

Bhopal-based Vijay Athlye is a brave investor. He is brave because he has won many mental battles that would intimidate an average person. Vijay saw his father lose all his retirement money in equities. To make things worse, hundreds of share certificates were sold to a scrap vendor. But fortune favours the brave. Vijay's personal portfolio topped the magical mark of Rs 1 crore in 2013. Today, he invests Rs 50,000 per month through systematic investments plans (SIPs) and is an ebullient ambassador of mutual funds. The tragedy Vijay's father was a government official. Vijay completed his post graduation in 1987 and immediately started his pest-control business. "As a child, I didn't know what investing was, let alone saving. My parents never managed to save anything due to our education expenses. The first 'spare' money my family got was in the form of retirement benefit of my father. With it, he applied in almost every IPO at that time. Unfortunately, he lost all his retirement money and later sold hundreds of his share certificates to a scrap vendor at Rs 5 per kg," recalls Vijay. It's not that Vijay's father, K L Athlye, always got allotment in bad companies. But due to the lack of facilities and tools required to understand what a good company is, Vijay's dad did not retain shares of good firms for long. He got original allotment in the Infosys IPO but sold the shares when the price appreciated. Similarly, one of Vijay's brothers was allotted Tata Elxsi's shares but immediately offloaded them to b

This article was originally published on October 18, 2021, and last updated on September 12, 2022.