Arjun had always dismissed the stock market as sophisticated gambling. But when the pandemic lockdowns emptied the streets of Mumbai in 2020, boredom drove him to open a demat account. He wasn’t a trader; he was a historian by training, now working a lifeless IT job. One night, staring at a chaotic Excel sheet of Nifty 50 closing prices, he had an idea: What if I treat the market like a living archive?
He kept digging.
Five years later, he opened the laptop again. His investment had tripled. The news was full of "record highs" and "overvalued warnings." But the historical data smiled back at him: Same panic, different date.
Then he saw it: a pattern no news anchor discussed. Every major crash—2000, 2008, 2020—was followed by a recovery that broke the previous all-time high within 18 to 36 months. The drawdowns were terrifying. But the long-term slope was relentless: roughly 14% compounded annually.
He downloaded the full historical dataset—every single trading day from its 1995 base value of 1,000 points to the present. 25 years of data. 6,000-odd rows of open, high, low, close.