Poonam Birdi had herself lost “good money” in the markets “in lakhs” by afternoon today, but the approach was different. “I feel it is the time to pick your risk, an opportunity,” she told Newsline over phone from Ludhiana. Birdi’s entry to the market—immediately after the last general elections when the market had plunged badly—is what she says prepared her for today.

“Everyone accepts a happy story. Nobody questioned the momentum that started in August last year. This is just a reaction, a correction that was waiting to happen,” says Birdi, whose losses comes even as she “always puts her money in research-backed decisions” and has even convinced an otherwise conservative Punjabi family to follow suit.

Birdi’s story is not an isolated one in a country where the youth have started looking up to the finance ministry’s projections of a over 8.5 per cent growth and opted for the markets at the turn of last year’s momentous ride—which started at 12,000 points.

Like Birdi, Sonal Goenka (22) is also “optimistic about FM’s promise” and opened a demat account just a few months ago with a total investment of around Rs 1.5 lakh—she lost over Rs 50,000 in the first few minutes after the market opened. But Goenka, who is now applying to study abroad, is undeterred and invested another Rs 50,000 after 2 pm when the market started to stabilise a bit”. “I understand it is natural to feel paranoid. This is the real test and if one can stay calm and watch for the right decisions, one will not lose in the long run,” she said.

Goenka wants to remain invested even when she goes abroad. “What’s a market without fluctuations? Every investor today knows that it the global market’s that is affecting this market too. We cannot remain isolated when everyone is going down. But we will recover,” she said.

Another investor and trader Jitendra Devji Mota (48) was among the few who played their “mathematics correct” and reaped profits even as news channels relayed the news of a person in Gujarat who died of a cardiac arrest over the market fluctuations.

But Mota feels that “most of the burning happens when an untrained hand reaches to the market.” He says it’s only analysis of the performance of the scrips, which will help one through.

Mota claims that he studies and maintains “graphs of all the days when the markets have fallen, right from the Harshad Mehta days. He says he only put the “momentum reaction to practice and followed some precautions” after he brought at extremely good rates. Birdi agrees saying her three years in the field did not prepare her for the rate at which the Indian markets reacted to the American rate-cuts.