Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Anuj Rakheja : To give you a brief about The Momentum Investing Co., we are an edtech firm providing stock market education to retail investors. I have been trading and investing since 2010 when I got out of school. My journey was very similar to what an average stock market trader experiences. I started off buying stocks on tips, news and intuition while I was still pursuing my CA. And to be honest, I lost quite a lot of money in the initial 5 years of my journey.
After I qualified CA in 2015, I was working with a big 4 firm and travelling on an assignment. My flight was delayed and to kill time, I thought of surfing the book store at the airport. There, I found a book by Nicolas Darvas (a dancer who made $2,000,000 in the stock market in 2 years). That book completely changed my perspective towards stocks and introduced me to the concept of trend following/momentum investing. I started practising momentum investing techniques in 2015 and by 2020, I had made pretty sizeable returns from stocks, beating the markets comfortably and I had also gained a lot of knowledge about how to buy and sell stocks like the pros.
In 2020, after I had completed my MBA from the Indian School of Business, I realized that there were crores of retail investors in India who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. They were all doing what I did from 2010-2015 - buying stocks based on hunches, news and tips. This is when I decided to create an instagram page (because that is where the millenials and the Gen Z were). The page was initially started as a hobby and eventually as it became popular, I decided to make it a full time venture along with my co-founder Jatin Mehta, who is also a Chartered Accountant.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by The Momentum Investing Co
Anuj Rakheja : Presently, we provide stock market education services to retail investors (most of whom are in the age bracket of 20-35. We have trained 1000+ students within a year and have received rave reviews from our students. One can head to our instagram page and checkout some of our reviews and content.
We also provide advisory to HNIs(High Net Worth Individuals) with respect to their investments, be it direct equity, debt, mutual funds or real estate.
Great Companies: What makes The Momentum Investing Co different from hundreds of other similar edutech Firms?
Anuj Rakheja : Some of the things that make us different from hundreds of other edtech firms are:
1. Niche offering: Our offering is very niche, we provide stock market education which is not provided to people in schools, colleges or universities. Even the ventures that offer stock market education provide very broad based overviews instead of a niche investment philosophy that we teach. Our strategies and investing philosophy is inspired by great investors like William O'Neil, Nicolas Darvas, Mark Minervini and Stan Weinstein. These people are not known in the popular media but are the actual stock market greats who beat the markets consistently and made millions (sometimes billions) of dollars.
2. A credible founding team: Unlike some of the other unorganised stock market teachers out there, our founding team has immense credibility. I, myself, am a Chartered Accountant and an MBA from India's best B-school, while Jatin (co-founder) is a Chartered Accountant with 10+ years of experience in the capital markets.
3. Unique alumni privileges: If you ask any of our students, they have access to alumni privileges even after the course they opted for gets over. Our job isn't over once the course that the student opted for finishes. Our job is to engage with our students for lifelong learning.Our alum cohort comprises of really smart people who have successful careers. This also provides an incredible networking opportunity to our students after the course is over.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Anuj Rakheja : Some of the struggles and challenges that we faced initially were:
1. We were bootstrapped, so we didn't have a very large marketing budget and had to rely on word of mouth and quality content.
2. With the covid pandemic, working remotely was a challenge for some of our employees initially, but we worked it out well eventually
3. One of the challenges is scaling. As the number of our students grows, we need to scale our team, train them and make sure the quality is not compromised.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for The Momentum Investing Co?
Anuj Rakheja : While we have started off as an edtech firm, but we are going to expand into other wealth management services and intend to build a super-app as far as wealth management needs are concerned over the next 5 years.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Anuj Rakheja : When you start up, you need to focus on two things - product and marketing. These two things need to be absolutely perfect, of course there would be iterations, but make sure you don't slack off in these two areas. The remaining you can outsource. And read a lot of books, reading books needs to be a part of your work, this is where you will get your motivation and ideas from.