Thread by @KAnantrao

Believe in Destiny but before that believe in self
It was sometime around 2004-2008 (that is not important in context with the story) when I was employed with one of the largest Debt Market Brokerage firm in their Institutional Equities division as a Chief Technical Strategist

I had been employed with the firm for more than a year now and my life was set and smooth. Reach office at 8 AM (markets used to open at 9:55 AM those days), release the daily market outlook report to institutional clients, attend morning meeting (I preferred the term"mourning')

have breakfast and then markets till 3:30 PM. No Laptops were given so no work from home. Finish the ground work by 4:30 PM and board the 5:00 PM local to reach home at 6:15 PM which was luxury in those days. My reporting boss whom i shall nickname "IC" was a chilled out guy

told me one thing upfront on day one of reporting. Anant, I don't understand anything about technical & derivatives & neither am interested. Do what ever you think needs to be done to justify yourself in this organisation but remember, you create a mess, you clean it. You aren't

my responsibility. You just report to me because of the nature of the work you do is classified as "Research".
In terms of Candlestick Charting, I was literally an "Abandoned Baby"🤣🤣.
So here I was, supposed to service institutional clients without support from any colleague.

So I started preparing drafts of my first report i.e. the Daily market outlook. At the outset, I was clear, I didn't want to use the template which I built during my previous employment. I wanted to build a new one from scratch. I saw the stuff available in markets at that time &

started building a daily market outlook which was somewhat different compared to at least 20-30 peers.
Everyone gave top 5 price gainers losers, volume gainers losers or FII/DII activity or previous days foreign market changes blah blah.
Remember those were pre smartphone days &

Daily report was one of the criterion of your abilities as a TA/DA on the judgement day whenever it was. In terms of client hierarchy, LIC was undisputed numero uno client for any institutional broker followed by MF's & private insurance companies which were slowly germinating

their footprint in Indian Market those days. The bottom of the pyramid consisted of Bank Treasuries mostly consisting of PSU Banks followed by a handful of private banks.
However for our company due to our large footprint in Debt Market as a broker, Bank Treasuries were at par

with some MF's as we got an entry easily into equities courtesy our DEBT Broking activities.
The Bank Treasuries were huge when it came to Debt / FX those days and banks like Bank India & Allahabad Bank was considered a market movers only inferior to LIC & SBI in debt markets.

So it was natural that bank treasury team felt all powerful and mighty while dealing with brokers even in equities although their book size may not have been 1/5th of a small MF those days. The treasury guys were presumably well read about global markets across asset classes

which made meetings with them a nightmare especially if you had an opposite view to theirs. Majority of them claimed to be Technical Analyst given unlimited access to applications like Reuters, Bloomberg and Telerate.

But does having a rifle with scope at home make you a SNIPER?

I remember a Treasury Bank client, who'd call as speak to me at length about markets during market hours sometimes as long as 60-90 mins. asking my opinion Crude, Gold, Sensex etc. and I wondered how he has so much time to spend with a small time TA like me. He would go on and on

speaking about cycles, super cycles & grand super cycles over the phone, mix it with fundamentals & economy to arrive at a holistic picture & to be honest initially even I felt elated that an institutional investor calls me to take my view. Hell, who won't be? He turned out to

a small fish who wanted attention after being transferred from Debt to Equity due to internal policies.
Meanwhile, I finalised my daily report / weekly report / monthly report formats and went to show the final draft to "IC" who conveniently passed the buck to Head of Sales, who

was the real TA at the scene & my inclusion was only to reduce his workload so that he could focus more on business development & revenue generation.

Wow, I thought I was the main tyre and discovered that I was actually a stepney.🤣🤣🤣🤣

Around the same time, i observed that there was slow but steady outflow of some key members of the team, like a Head of Sales had exited a month after I joined. "IC" quit to join as advisor to famous investment manager "Banana" around 6-8 months after I joined. 2-3 research

colleagues quit to join as Junior Fund Managers with MF's. A couple of analysts quit to join bigger broking firms. All these were happening around when RBI introduced NDS i.e. screen based trading in Debt Markets for G-Sec and suddenly debt broking became a costly affair given

the Banks, MF and Insurance could have their own terminals and not go through brokers necessarily. But the management was still hiring some manpower in equities which was surprising although they were replacing a 10YR experience guy with a 3-5 yr one. My interaction with DII's

increased as my calls started doing a bit okay in the short run given bank treasuries preferred calls for short term and slowly my colleagues from sales and dealing started taking me out on client meetings either as an accessory or as an excuse to leave office early.

But I wasn't satisfied with what ever I was doing, so I started writing case studies on stocks to from a medium to long term perspective giving 40% plus targets on large cap stocks with a hope to be taken seriously by colleagues. I was joined by new set of colleagues from DEBT

broking team who were reassigned to equities as our company started unwinding DEBT broking slowly. The debt guys were much better & friendly with me and used to take me to meetings with DII's at least not as an accessory or an excuse for leaving early. My case study reports also

started making noise courtesy efforts from new team mates who pushed all research equally to most of the clients.
Buoyed by the reception of Case Studies, I wrote my first ever Index Case study in May'06 with a "SELL" and accidentally released it a day before it peaked.

I was confident of my research & was chided to the verge of being humiliated by entire dealing and sales (old team mates) while new team mates showed hesitation in pushing a "SELL Report". Even Wealth Team was critical about the report although it had no business with my report

But DESTINY had some other plans for me perhaps. Nifty declined from 3774 to 2595 in mere 5-6 weeks making it a 31% decline including two lower freeze. Not a single soul in the office came to congratulate for the risk I undertook of writing a sell report.

Lesson: Do your job

However, unknown to me, the report was read by the some senior guy in investments team in LIC who called my dealer, asking me whether I would give a presentation to his team on a Saturday on the broad markets.

Lesson: Believe in Destiny but first believe in self

That was my first big break into the big league of DII's. Will keep sharing as and when I recollect more such anecdotes and happening which helped me shape my career as a TA in institutional broking.

Thanks for reading 🙏🙏🙏

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