Gaurav Sharma – Fail Fast, Fail Early, Move On

Gaurav Sharma holds a post-graduate degree in management from Birla Institute of Management Technology (Bimtech), in Uttar Pradesh, India, and a bachelor of science degree from the University of Rajasthan. He has had a rewarding five years of experience at various multinational companies in the domains of wealth management, investment analysis and portfolio reporting. He is presently working towards democratization and simplification of the wealth management services by leveraging machine learning, AI and data science. Gaurav aims to solve problems across customer segments comprising the masses, the affluent middle class and high-net-worth individuals (HNIs). During his tenure at Moody’s Analytics, he gained practical exposure to global standards of investment research and reporting through various tool such as Bloomberg, Morningstar, FactSet and other proprietary tools. At Mercer, he gained exposure to asset allocation, financial and retirement planning, and investment consulting. Prior to these, Gaurav worked in the global wealth and investment management business-line of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch and supported ultra-HNIs in managing their wealth.    “If the company’s growth plans are there, it will work.But if the management is not able to understand and … make investors’lives easy by telling them everything, if they try to hide and try to play with the accounting standards, and of course, if they try to siphon off money,at the end of the day, investors will get to know.” Gaurav Sharma   Worst investment ever  Young blood catches bug for stock investing  Gaurav was very young when he became interested in the stock market and was one of those guys who “jumped right into it”. He borrowed some money from a friend’s father, who was kind enough to believe in his investment philosophy. Due to his youthful enthusiasm, he was trying to make it big very soon in the market.   First foray rides educational technology wave in India  So, he decided to invest in education technology company, Educomp Solutions (Educomp, EDSO.NS). He did some balance sheet analysis and most of the basic research, and invested in the stock around its peak in 2008-2009. The company appeared to be at the forefront of the education-plus-technology mix, and for India, with hundreds of thousands of public, private, international and specialty schools all looking to drag their classrooms away from chalk boards, it seemed a no-lose situation. He bet really big on it, the numbers looked good, and every one or two years, there was very good news about Educomp winning contracts with 15 to 20 schools. Add to that the promotion of the K-12 education system, and government policy wanting to put a tablet into every student’s hands, everything was going great.  Hidden mismanagement leads to company’s downfall Gaurav says that if