Everyone Told Me Markets Were Too Risky for a Woman. I Became a SEBI Registered Analyst Anyway.
I still remember the first time I told someone I wanted to trade.
The response wasn't encouragement. It wasn't curiosity. It was a smile. That particular kind of smile that says — beta, yeh tumhare liye nahi hai.
Markets are risky. Markets are complicated. Markets are for people with decades of experience, big capital, and — though nobody said it out loud — the right gender.
I was 22. I had an MBA in Finance, a genuine obsession with how markets work, and zero tolerance for being told what I couldn't do.
So I started anyway.
Studying harder instead of quitting
Not with confidence. With curiosity. I made mistakes in my first year that I would never let a mentee make today. I overtraded. I held losing positions too long because I was too proud to book a loss. I bought stocks on tips and paid the price for it.
But I also did something most people don't do when they're losing — I studied harder instead of quitting.
I read annual reports. I backtested strategies. I sat with charts for hours trying to understand not just what the market was doing but why. I treated every loss as a data point rather than a verdict on whether I belonged here.
And slowly, something shifted.
The market doesn't care about your gender
The market, I discovered, does not care about your gender. It does not care about your age, your background, or what anyone at a dinner table once told you about risk.
It only cares about one thing — whether you have done the work or not.
That realisation was genuinely liberating. Because it meant that every barrier I had been told existed was actually optional. The only thing standing between me and becoming serious about markets was whether I was willing to put in the work consistently, over time, without shortcuts.
I was.
Six years later
Six years later, I am a SEBI Registered Research Analyst. I run Finance With Palak, a research and mentorship platform serving traders and investors across India. I run a live Nifty Options intraday research service. I mentor aspiring traders — many of them women — who have heard the exact same things I once heard.
And every single time someone tells me markets are too risky, too complex, too male — I think about that smile from 2018 and feel genuinely grateful for it.
Because it made me want to prove something. Not to them. To myself.
Why I'm sharing this today
I don't tell this story for applause. I tell it because I know there are people reading this right now who are sitting on the edge of a decision.
Maybe you want to learn trading but feel like you're too late, too new, too something.
Maybe someone in your life — a parent, a partner, a colleague — has given you that smile too.
Maybe you've started and stumbled and quietly wondered whether you actually belong in this space.
You do.
The market is brutal and unforgiving and deeply humbling. But it is also completely indifferent to every story someone else has written about who you are and what you're capable of.
Your only job is to learn properly, build a real process, and stay in the game long enough for that process to work.
Agar maine kar liya, toh aap bhi kar sakte ho.
I built Finance With Palak for exactly this reason — so that nobody has to figure out markets alone, the hard way, while being told they don't belong.
Ready to start properly? My mentorship programme is open for a limited number of serious students.
