Vijay Kedia

Vijay Kedia entered the stock market at 19, thrust into it by family circumstances after his father's death, with no formal training and no clear strategy.

The pain: For nearly a decade, Kedia traded without real discipline or a defined method, and by his own account, lost money for years before anything clicked. That's a long, honest, uncomfortable stretch of failure that most retellings of successful investors' stories tend to skip past quickly — but it's the part that actually matters.

The lesson: Out of that long losing period, Kedia eventually developed his "SMILE" framework for finding future multibagger stocks: Small size (small, growing companies with room to expand), Medium quality (not necessarily perfect yet, but genuinely improving), In high-growth or promising businesses, Long-term time horizon, and Excellent management he could trust to execute over years. Just as important as the framework itself was the patience it demanded — several of his best-known picks took years of little visible movement before the market caught on and re-rated them sharply. His own commonly repeated point captures the emotional cost: multi-bagger returns don't arrive quickly or comfortably — they demand sitting through long, uneventful, doubt-filled stretches first.

The lesson: if a decade of losses came before the method that finally worked, the real skill wasn't avoiding failure — it was staying in the game long enough, and reflecting honestly enough, to eventually build one.