Ramesh Damani — The Broker’s Son Who Bet His House on Infosys

In 1993, a 35-year-old broker’s son walked into a branch of State Bank of India in South Mumbai and asked the manager to put his family home — and his father’s membership card at the BSE — up as collateral for a margin loan. He wanted to bet it all on an underperformed IPO from a small software company called Infosys. The manager thought he was insane. His own father thought so too. Twelve years later, the bet would have compounded enough to let him never work another day in his life. Forty years later, he would be the only man on Indian television who had earned, with full credibility, the right to say: “I have been right more often than I have been wrong, because I have chosen to be in only one market my entire life.”

The Broker’s Son Who Went to California

Ramesh Shivdasani Damani was born in 1957 in Mumbai. His father, Shivdasani Damani — no relation to Radhakishan Damani, despite the shared surname — was a respected member of the Bombay Stock Exchange. The family was comfortable: a flat in a good part of Mumbai, a car, a driver, annual summer holidays. But Ramesh’s father was unusual for a BSE broker of his generation. He insisted that Ramesh should not, under any circumstances, go straight into broking. He wanted his son to see the world first.

Ramesh followed his father’s wish. He went to the United States for his graduate education and ended up at California State University, Northridge, where he studied finance. The California years were, in a way that most Indian investors of his generation did not experience, formative. He read every Benjamin Graham book available. He read Buffett’s Berkshire letters as they came out. He subscribed to Value Line. He watched American financial television — a phenomenon that, in mid-1980s India, simply did not exist.

Most importantly, he saw how a mature equity culture functioned: how ordinary people owned shares of GE, Coca-Cola and IBM; how mutual funds served middle-class Americans; how the press treated the market as a normal economic activity rather than a gambling den.

He returned to Mumbai in 1987. He was thirty.

The 1990s: A Broker Who Wanted to Be an Investor

Ramesh joined his father at the BSE. He became a broker — but one with different instincts from his peers. He was unusually patient. He spent hours reading annual reports when most of his peers were busy on the floor shouting bids. He insisted, to the irritation of his father’s old clients, on discussing five-year growth prospects when the clients just wanted next week’s tip.

When the 1992 Harshad Mehta scam broke, Ramesh was, by his own later accounts, relatively unscathed. He had been uninvolved in the Mehta circles. His own accounts were small. The market crash that followed gave him — like it gave Radhakishan Damani, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, Vallabh Bhansali and a handful of other quiet accumulators — the chance to pick up quality at prices that would not repeat for a generation.

By the end of 1992, Ramesh had built small starter positions in Asian Paints, Hindustan Lever, Glaxo, ITC, and Britannia. He had also, without realising it, begun to develop the conviction-heavy style that would eventually define his career.

1993: The Infosys Bet That Changed His Life

When Infosys came to the public market in June 1993, at ₹95 per share, the Indian retail response was famously underwhelming. As we have seen in the Nemish Shah lesson, the IPO was undersubscribed. Morgan Stanley took 13% of the issue at the last minute to keep it alive. Most Mumbai brokers recommended their clients stay away — “what does a Bangalore software shop have that Wipro or Infotec doesn’t?”

Ramesh Damani read the prospectus twice. He met Narayana Murthy. He listened to the way Murthy spoke about receivables, about code quality, about quarterly reporting discipline. Then he did something that today seems obvious but was, at the time, nearly reckless.

He approached a banker at SBI and applied for a loan secured by his family’s property. He put what was, for him, a massive personal margin call on the table: ₹15 lakh of his own savings, plus leveraged capacity up to ₹25 lakh. His target: to pick up 10,000 shares of Infosys at the IPO price and to accumulate more in the first weeks after listing.

His own father was furious when he found out. His father’s line — later retold by Ramesh on CNBC a decade on — was: “You have studied in America for nothing. No serious person buys a software company with borrowed money.”

Ramesh went ahead. He put in applications in multiple names — his own, his wife’s, various family members’. The allotment was generous because the retail tranche had been undersubscribed. His effective acquisition cost, across all channels, averaged around ₹105.

Then he held.

1993–2005: The Twelve-Year Hold

For the next twelve years, Ramesh Damani did not sell a single Infosys share. The stock split. It issued bonus shares. It listed on NASDAQ. It saw a 1999–2000 rally from roughly ₹2,400 to over ₹14,000. It saw a 2000–2002 crash that took it back to ₹2,800 — an 80% drawdown that broke the conviction of nearly every other Indian holder of the stock.

Ramesh did not flinch. His reasoning, repeated in countless interviews later, was:

“I did not buy Infosys because of its share price. I bought it because of Narayana Murthy. And Narayana Murthy was still coming to the office every morning, paying his taxes, growing his revenue, and not once acting like the owner of a single share. Why would I sell?”
— Ramesh Damani

By 2005, when Ramesh finally began to trim (not exit) his Infosys holding, his original effective cost of ₹105 per share had, after all the splits and bonuses, been translated into a massively larger share count at a market price in the ₹1,500–2,000 range.

The exact gain has never been publicly disclosed. But the approximate math is this: an adjusted pre-2005 cost base in the region of ₹30 lakh had compounded to a Infosys position worth, at its 2000 peak, an estimated ₹90–110 crore. By the time of his partial exits in 2005–2006, his realised gains on Infosys alone paid for the home his family would live in, the comfortable life they would lead, and — crucially — his financial independence for the rest of his career.

Ramesh Damani turned ₹30 lakh into ₹100 crore on a single stock, and he did it without doing anything cleverer than reading the prospectus, meeting the founder, and holding for twelve years.

The TV Career and the Title of “Thinking Investor”

In the late 1990s, CNBC India was launched. The channel, looking for on-air talent who could explain the market in a measured way, approached a short list of Mumbai investors. Most were reluctant. Ramesh Damani said yes — on one condition: he would not, ever, give stock tips on air.

That condition, kept scrupulously for twenty-five years, became the foundation of his public reputation. Unlike many CNBC regulars of the era, Ramesh was willing to talk about process, psychology, historical episodes, and the general philosophy of long-term investing — but he refused to say the words “Buy this stock today.” This professional self-denial was unusual, and, paradoxically, it made his sporadic thematic calls (he was famously bullish on sugar stocks in 2004, on Jubilant Foodworks around the Domino’s India listing, on certain midcap pharma stories) more credible, not less, when he finally made them.

Dalal Street’s own nickname for him has always been “the thinking investor” — a term that would be cringe-inducing if applied to almost anyone else. Ramesh simply came across, on air and off, as the most evidently well-read investor in the country. He quoted Ben Graham, Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, John Train and James Grant with the ease of someone who had actually read them, not merely catalogued them.

His Deep Bet on Indian Sugar (The Call Nobody Remembers)

In 2004, at a time when Indian sugar was a cyclical dog that nobody wanted to touch, Ramesh Damani went on CNBC and said — on camera — that he believed the ethanol blending programme, once ramped up, would structurally revalue the entire Indian sugar industry over the subsequent decade.

He started quietly buying positions in Bajaj Hindusthan, Balrampur Chini, Triveni Engineering, and EID Parry. Over the next three years, the sugar sector tripled in market cap. Ramesh publicly exited in 2008, ahead of the post-crisis collapse. Not every holder in the basket stayed disciplined — many of his followers held too long and gave back the gains — but for those who followed him in and out on schedule, the trade was a classic Damani thesis: contrarian entry, thematic thesis, disciplined exit.

What is less well known is that in 2018, Ramesh revisited the thesis and publicly re-entered the sugar basket on the grounds that ethanol blending was about to go from policy theory to policy reality. Over the subsequent three years, the sector quadrupled again.

“Patience is my only edge. I am prepared to wait until the boring story becomes the exciting story. Most of the market is not.”
— Ramesh Damani

The Jubilant Foodworks Call

In 2010, when Jubilant Foodworks — the master franchisee of Domino’s Pizza in India — listed on the BSE, Ramesh Damani was one of the earliest vocal supporters. His thesis: pizza was not a Western luxury; it was, specifically, a food-delivery format that would align perfectly with Indian urban growth and small-family consumption patterns. A listed franchise of a globally-disciplined brand with fast store-unit economics was, he believed, the only way a retail investor could ride Indian consumer growth without betting on a single untested startup.

The stock, from its IPO price of ₹145, traded at over ₹3,000 within four years — roughly 20× in 4 years. Ramesh held for nearly a decade. By the time he reduced the position, it had been one of the largest single-name contributors to his public portfolio.

The Philosophy, Said Out Loud

Because Ramesh Damani is the most articulate Indian investor of his generation in public, his interviews are — effectively — a free, year-round masterclass. Here are the phrases that have become, through repetition, the informal textbook of Indian equity investing:

• “We are not in the stock-picking business. We are in the pattern-recognition business.”
• “The two hardest questions in investing are: what to buy, and how long to hold. The second is harder than the first.”
• “Indian markets reward patience more than intelligence. I have met many intelligent impatient investors. I have met no patient poor investors.”
• “There is no such thing as a risk-free stock. There is only such a thing as a stock you understand well enough to hold through its risk.”
• “I have been wrong 40% of the time. My only skill is that when I am right, I hold for long enough to be rewarded. And when I am wrong, I refuse to add.”

That last sentence is, arguably, the single most useful sentence in Indian retail investing literature.

The Family, the Library, and the Daily Routine

Ramesh Damani lives with his wife in a South Mumbai apartment that doubles as a working library. Friends who have visited describe it as having more books per square metre than most university reading rooms. He is a voracious reader, famously including history, economic history, biography, and American business journalism. He has named Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods as his single most influential book, closely followed by Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor.

His daily routine, described in a 2021 profile:

• 6:30 AM: walking at Marine Drive, carrying a book
• 8:00–10:00 AM: reading annual reports and international news over coffee
• 10:00 AM–1:00 PM: office at a small BSE Tower location, where he runs his investments personally with a tiny team
• 1:00–3:00 PM: lunch and a nap (a habit he freely admits to on CNBC)
• 3:00–7:00 PM: evening walk, reading, occasional TV engagements, occasional dinners with fellow Mumbai investors — most commonly Radhakishan Damani, Nemish Shah (until his semi-retirement), Vallabh Bhansali, and Samir Arora

He has explicitly refused, at multiple points, to start a mutual fund or take outside money. His reason: “The moment you manage other people’s money, you start thinking about how to defend your strategy to them. That is the beginning of bad decisions.”

The 2020 COVID Call

In March 2020, as Indian markets crashed 40% in three weeks, Ramesh Damani went on Bloomberg TV India and said: “This is the single largest buying opportunity in Indian equities in the last twelve years. I am putting capital to work every day this week.”

Within 24 months, the market had more than doubled. The positions he added in March–April 2020 — across Indian pharma, private banks, and consumer staples — remain, by multiple accounts, the fastest-doubling cohort he had ever bought in a concentrated window.

He did not claim credit publicly. He simply used the episode, in subsequent interviews, to reinforce what he had been saying for thirty years: crashes are gifts. Every investor who has made serious money in India has had to run towards a burning building at least twice in their career.

Lessons From the Thinking Investor

• Education, not information, is the investor’s real edge. Ramesh’s Northridge years — where he read Graham, Buffett, and Bernstein — gave him a conceptual scaffold that most Indian investors of his generation never built. The compounded value of those 500 books read in his 20s is greater than anyone can calculate.
• The best trade of your life may require leverage you will never take again. His 1993 Infosys purchase was made with borrowed money. He has repeatedly said, on air, that he would never advise any retail investor to take on comparable leverage today. The right trade at the right moment is a once-a-decade event.
• Refusing to give tips is a brand. Ramesh’s public credibility, built across 25 years of CNBC appearances, rests on one discipline: he never gives a “buy this today” call. This refusal has been, in hindsight, the most profitable branding decision he ever made — it separates him entirely from the tip-peddling economy.
• Cycles repeat. Patience rewards. His sugar thesis in 2004 and his revisit in 2018 are a single teaching: if the cycle is structural, the second time is sometimes even better than the first.
• Crashes are not the risk. Being out of the market during a crash is. The 2020 COVID buying spree is the clearest public record of this in his career. The people who outperformed the market in the subsequent years all had one thing in common: they were buyers, not sellers, in March 2020.
• Do not manage outside money. Ramesh’s refusal to take other people’s capital allowed him to hold Infosys for twelve years, to exit sugar cleanly in 2008, and to buy aggressively in 2020 without quarterly pressure. It is a luxury most professional investors would kill for.

The Quiet Power of Not Being in a Hurry

In 2022, at a small investor gathering at the Willingdon Club in Mumbai, Ramesh Damani was asked by a 28-year-old aspiring investor for “the single most important piece of advice.” He thought for a long moment. His answer, according to several people present that evening:

“If you can go a week without looking at a stock quote, you have the first qualification to be a great investor. If you can go a month, you have the second. If you can go a year, you can probably stop listening to me and go write your own book.”
— Ramesh Damani

Nearly four decades after his father told him that “no serious person buys a software company with borrowed money,” Ramesh Damani has — through Infosys, sugar, Jubilant, banks, consumer staples, and a library of 5,000 books — proved that the most serious investor in Mumbai may be precisely the person who refused to take himself seriously enough to panic.

He is, as Dalal Street calls him, a thinking investor. And in a market that has always rewarded action more than reflection, his career is a forty-year reminder that thought, slowly applied over long periods of time, outcompetes almost everything else.