Pranjal Kamra

Some Lesser Known Facts About Pranjal Kamra

• Pranjal Kamra is one of the top financial experts in India. He is the co-founder and CEO of Finology Ventures Pvt. Ltd, a legal and financial consultancy firm.

• His first business model was renting out comic books and CDs when he was in the 5th grade.

• In an interview, Pranjal admitted that he was shy and reserved in his school days. He was a weak student, and he was often criticised by his teachers for his improper speaking skills. To improve his fluency, he made a habit of reading newspapers. Pranjal started taking part in debates and worked on his articulation skills. This made him a confident speaker.

• Pranjal chose to pursue a career in law as he thought that articulation skills are all that is required to become a good lawyer; however, after joining the Hidayatullah National Law University, he soon realised that for being a good lawyer one needs to do more in-depth research than just speaking dramatically. He was ranked 131 in a batch of 145 students.

• According to Pranjal, he was not interested in studying law. While he was studying in college, he devoted most of his time to attending various social movements happening in Chhattisgarh. He also spent his time competing in parliamentary debates. This severely affected his studies, and he had to clear 25 examinations (most of them were reappear exams) in his last semester.

• He developed an interest in finance in the third year of his graduation. According to Pranjal, he was influenced by the ever-changing world of the stock market. In an interview, talking about his first investment in the stock market, he said,
  

  I casually asked my father for money to invest. He gave me Rs. 20,000 on the condition that I if I lose it, I would have to focus entirely on my Legal Studies. That very year my father had gifted me my first scooter, which was a TVS wego and I was totally in love with it. So due to this emotional attachment, I invested in TVS motors and beginner’s luck worked in my favour, in almost a year, the stock grew 10 times and the 4 thousand I had invested was now worth 40 thousand. I became overconfident and all the other stocks I bought failed miserably.”

• In the fourth year of his graduation, he started reading about Warren Buffett (an American business tycoon) and was really impressed by his ideologies and market strategies. In the final year of his law graduation, Pranjal faced a predicament when his parents wanted him to pursue a postgraduate degree in law (LLM), and he desired to pursue a course related to the stock market from the National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM), the only institute in India affiliated to the SEBI.

• He lied to his parents and went to Mumbai to give the NISM entrance exam. The interviewers were impressed by him, and later, he convinced his parents to let him pursue his dream career.

• While he was studying at NISM, he realised that the financial and insurance market was plagued by the misleading and biased advice of experts. According to him, he wanted to create a platform that provided people with in-depth and impartial information about the stock market. In 2018, Mr Kamra founded Finology Ventures Pvt. Ltd., a company that provides its customers with financial and legal services.

  

• In an interview, talking about the journey of creating Finology, he said,
  

  I had no money and I couldn’t ask my father so I basically started Finology as an expanded blog, I learned a bit of coding and designed the website, I started making YouTube videos from June 2017 and for the first 6 months, no one was watching me. I made more than 60 videos to no response. But, I kept learning SEO (Search Engine Optimization), graphic designing and my personal investments were doing well. So, I was learning various arts constantly and thereby each video was better than the previous one. Finally, my 61st video went viral and it has been a good going since then.”

• He met his girlfriend, Priya Jain, in 2008, and she is a law graduate. She is the co-founder of Finology, and she is the head of legal studies and the taxation department of the firm. She also runs the YouTube channel Finology Legal, which has more than 780K subscribers as of 2020.

• Finology Ventures is the first and only SEBI registered investment advisory firm in Chhattisgarh. In an interview, when he was asked about the right age to start investing, he said,
  

  There’s a very simple answer to this question. There’s a living legend in the world of investing named Mr. Warren Buffett. He is great not just because of the fact that he has acquired humongous wealth, he’s great because of his investment journey. He started investing when he was just 11-years-old. And, now he’s 89. So, if you start at a young age, you keep evolving and you live long to reap the fruits of your investment efforts, you’ve made it in life! So, the perfect age and time to invest is NOW.”

• Pranjal has authored two business books, ‘Mint Your Money: An Easy Manual to Unlocking Your Wealth‘ and ‘Investonomy: The Stock Market Guide That Makes You Rich‘ (2020).

• Pranjal’s videos on YouTube have crossed millions of views. As of 2020, he has more than 2.24 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. His videos are related to trending financial topics.