Arabian Business meets the serial entrepreneur as he seeks partners in Dubai for his latest venture
There is no college that will teach you how to trade than actually experiencing these ups and downs and emotions you might have had as you start off with trading.
With a keen interest in trading, he said he “stumbled” upon the stock markets, through his brother and his friends, who were already operating in that environment.
“The great thing about trading is there is no ceiling. If you’re a good trader you can buy a larger amount and if you’re continuing to make money you can scale and scale and scale. You’re not limited to many things and I think that was very attractive to me,” he said.
“Also the fact that a job in trading doesn’t require any minimum qualification. Anybody can study the financial markets, you can read up online, you can buy books about different systems and methodologies of trading and investing and become a good trader on your own,” he added.
That’s not to say he hit the jackpot overnight. Kamath admitted his path through trading, brokerages and asset management has been “riddled” with mistakes, but it was the lessons learned from these that placed him on the path to where he is today.
He said: “Much like any other trader, when I started off I made plenty of mistakes5. I think the first three or four years of my trading profession were riddled with mistakes. All I did was make a little bit of money, make a mistake, lose that money and that cycle continued for a few years.
“A great teacher in the realm of trading is experience. I think nothing teaches you to be a better trader than losing money. In hindsight, when I think back to that time, I think those have been the biggest lessons of my life.
“There is no college that will teach you how to trade than actually experiencing these ups and downs and emotions you might have had as you start off with trading.”
Fortunately, many of the strategies learned on the chess board, remained true to his new profession.
He explained: “It teaches you a lot, especially in your trading career or in different things you might do in life. More about the importance of following a framework and having rules and systems in place, within which you have to operate. I think that could also be the key to trading because in trading there are a bunch of rules you can’t break; there are cardinal rules which you break over a long period, say 10 or 20 years, if a certain rule is not being followed, that one instance can cause significant damage to your portfolio.