Shankar sharma first global biography of william

Shankar Sharma, 52
Vice-chairman and joint managing director, First Global Stockbroking

“There is money to be made in junk and mispriced opportunities.” This is the philosophy that has held Shankar Sharma, vice-chairman and joint managing director, First Global Stockbroking, in good stead as he built his investment portfolio over a span of over three decades.

Sharma, who grew up in Dhanbad, a town in the coal-bearing belt of India’s Jharkhand-West Bengal border, had his first brush with punting on stocks in 1982, when he was in his second year of college.

“My father had died a year back and we didn’t have a lot wealth. We had a tenant who invested in IPOs (initial public offerings),” recalls Sharma. “Stocks that were purchased for as low as Rs 10 per share would appreciate between Rs 30 and Rs 50 in a short time, which was a lot of money in those days.

So I made my first investment by bu