RAAMDEO AGRAWAL

Raamdeo Agrawal grew up in a village in the Raipur area of Chhattisgarh. He came to Mumbai, studied accounting, and qualified as a Chartered Accountant.

The turning point was meeting Motilal Oswal. The two were paying guests living under the same roof, and they started out sharing a single sub-broker card on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

In 1987 they founded Motilal Oswal Financial Services. Then Raamdeo discovered Warren Buffett.

He read the Berkshire letters over and over and decided India needed its own version of that thinking. In 1996 he started the annual Wealth Creation Study, which digs into the stocks that made the most money over the previous five years.

He has published it every year since. The brokerage grew into a full financial group with an asset management arm, and Raamdeo's family stake made him a billionaire.

His main company is Motilal Oswal Financial Services, the group he co-founded in 1987. It does stock broking, wealth management, investment banking, and runs mutual funds through its asset management arm.

He personally owns about 21% of the listed company and his family roughly 30%, and that stake is where most of his net worth sits. On the investing side, he built the QGLP portfolio approach that the Motilal Oswal funds still use today.

His personal disclosed holdings lean toward the same kind of quality growth companies he preaches about. He runs the research culture, not just the trades.

The Wealth Creation Study is the group's calling card.

His whole method fits in four letters. QGLP.

That stands for Quality, Growth, Longevity, and Price. In plain English, he wants a good business (Quality), that is getting bigger (Growth), that can keep getting bigger for years (Longevity), bought at a sensible price (Price).

Get those four right and then do the hardest part. Nothing.

He calls it Buy Right, Sit Tight. The idea is that finding the stock is only half the job.

The real money comes from holding it for a decade or two while it compounds. He borrowed the spine of this from Warren Buffett and adapted it for fast-growing Indian companies.

Hero Honda. In the mid-1990s he put around Rs 10 lakh into the two-wheeler maker when the shares traded near Rs 30.

Then he did nothing for about 20 years. He finally sold in 2015 when the stock was near Rs 2,600.

That is roughly 86 times his money on a single position, held through every crash and boom in between. It became the textbook example of his own Buy Right, Sit Tight rule.

Most people would have sold after a double or a triple. He sat on it for two decades and let compounding do the work.

The Buy Right, Sit Tight faith has a catch, and it caught even him. Around 2018 to 2020, the quality growth stocks that his QGLP framework loves got extremely expensive.

Investors piled into a small set of 'safe' compounders and bid them up. Several Motilal Oswal mutual funds built on that same quality style lagged the market for two to three years while cheaper, unloved stocks quietly did better.

The lesson is blunt. Quality is not a free pass.

Pay too much even for a great business and you can wait years just to get back to even.

His rules are simple and he repeats them constantly. First, earnings drive everything.

He likes to say that if your earnings grow, your stock price will grow, and you can fake a price for a while but not forever. Second, compounding is measured in decades, not years, so time is your best friend.

Third, courage matters as much as analysis. He describes investing as vision to see what is coming, courage to bet on it, and patience to hold on.

It is not complicated. It is just very hard to actually do.

Raamdeo is married to Sunita Agrawal and lives in Mumbai. They have one son, Vaibhav.

In 2005 Vaibhav was kidnapped while living in a student hostel and was rescued by police, which is about the only time the family made the front pages for anything other than markets. For a man worth over two billion dollars, Raamdeo keeps an unusually quiet personal life.

His public persona is the mentor and teacher of Indian markets more than the flashy tycoon.

Raamdeo has a B.Com from the University of Mumbai and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. He came from a village in Chhattisgarh, so the CA qualification was his ticket into Mumbai's financial world.

The bigger part of his education, by his own telling, was self-taught. He learned investing by reading Warren Buffett, and he has gone to Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting in Omaha every year since 1995.

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