Stock Market Workshop at Parul University: Only 5% of India Invests, Compound Interest Fortune, and Warren Buffett’s Strategy.

The stock market workshop was conducted by CIRR- Center for International Relations and Research at Parul University on 25th March 2026. What made this session interesting was the speaker. The speaker, Tiago Marques, is not a finance professor or market analyst; he is a semester exchange student from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal. He came to Parul University for the student exchange program. The knowledge he shared was based on his learning, readings and observations he had from the current and previous trends in the market.

His father introduced him to personal finance years ago, and he continued learning through books and financial educational content. That honesty turned out to be the session’s greatest asset. Students asked questions freely because the person at the front was not performing expertise. He was sharing what he had genuinely learned, using presentation slides, interactive Mentimeter polls, a compound interest calculator, and short activities that kept the room engaged. Forty-five students participated in the closing quiz. For an audience with little or no prior investing experience, the level was exactly right.

He had also done something that the room noticed: he researched Indian economic data before presenting. He knew India’s GDP, its UPI transaction volumes, its tax structure for capital gains, and the names of Indian brokerage platforms. A Portuguese student standing in a Vadodara seminar hall and explaining why Indian tea that cost Rs 6 a cup in 2010 now costs Rs 15 was the kind of cross-cultural moment that only happens on a campus with 5,500+ international students from 75+ countries.

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Tiago opened the main content with India’s economic standing. One of the leading GDPs in the world, India has approximately USD 3.8 trillion and is growing at six to seven percent annually. This makes India rank in fifth position globally and is an active participant in both G20 and BRICS. With a 1.4 billion population, India has the highest number of young workers. Mainly under the age of 35.

Most of the students in the room had just started or were about to start their professional lives.

He identified three specific growth drivers. First, digital payments: UPI processes over 10 billion transactions per month, surpassing the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard globally. Second, manufacturing: international companies are increasingly setting up production bases in India. Third, a young, tech-literate population that grew up making UPI payments and checking prices on phones, unlike his grandfather’s generation in Portugal that had to call a stockbroker in the 1980s just to find out what a stock was trading at. The shift in access is generational and irreversible.

Before getting into how to invest, Tiago addressed why most people do not. In India, only about 5 percent of the population invests in the stock market. In the United States, it is around 50 percent. In Europe, approximately 34 percent. He identified three reasons for the gap.

The first is knowledge. People simply do not know enough about how markets work. The second is perception. Many treat investing as gambling. Tiago’s own uncle used to compare the stock market to a casino roulette table. But that comparison collapses under examination: when you buy a share, you are buying ownership in a real company with actual products, customers, and revenue. There is another barrier that people face, and that is social discomfort, the third barrier. Most of the communities in India discuss their status, investments, and personal wealth, which makes others feel down about their earnings. But the best part is that today’s generation is willing to learn and grow.

Apps make it simple to open accounts. India’s economy rewards those who stay invested over time.

The session’s most effective teaching moment came from a cup of tea. In 2010, Rs 90 could buy 15 cups of tea masala in India. Today, the same Rs 90 buys only 6 cups. The money did not change. Its purchasing power did. That is inflation. It affects groceries, fuel, rent, and virtually everything else. The issue with a savings account, Tiago explained, is that the interest it pays usually does not keep up with how fast prices are rising. In real terms, money in a savings account is actually losing value every year it sits there. A savings account protects your money. It does not grow. The bank takes your deposits, invests them, and keeps most of the returns. A brokerage account puts the investment decisions in your hands: more risk, but you keep the gains.

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mechanism is straightforward. Your returns start earning their own returns. The longer it runs, the faster it grows. He explained this with an example: Rs. 10,000 you put it in the fixed deposit at 10 percent interest annually. In simple interest, you get 20,000 after 10 years and 30,000 after 20 years, whereas in compound interest, you get 25,937 after 10 years and so on after 20 years.

Then he posed a question: Ankush starts investing at age 20 with Rs 10,000 and adds Rs 1,000 every month. Anuja starts at 30 with the same amounts. Ankush ends up with substantially more, not because he invested more money, but because he had ten additional years of compounding.

The story that anchored the concept was Warren Buffett and Coca-Cola. Starting in the 1980s, Buffett accumulated approximately 400 million shares of Coca-Cola at roughly USD 3 per share. Those shares now trade at around USD 79 each. But the more striking number is the dividends. Coca-Cola pays USD 2.12 per share annually. On 400 million shares, that is approximately USD 816 million per year, which works out to about USD 1,500 every single minute from one investment. The lesson, Tiago clarified, is not that everyone can replicate Buffett. It was to show, with real numbers, what compound growth and reinvested dividends actually look like when you give them enough time.

Tiago used a pizza on screen to explain stocks. A company like Reliance is the whole pizza. Individual shares are the slices. Buy a slice and you become a part-owner. You get a cut of the profits and benefit when the company grows.

Companies that find their place in the stock market through an IPO (Initial Public Offering), where shares trade on exchanges like the BSE in India or NYSE in the United States.

He then asked students to look around the room and name five brands they could actually invest in. The class identified Apple, Xiaomi, Realme, Puma, Levi’s, U.S. Polo, and Google. Every single one was physically present in the room on phones, clothes, or shoes.

For students who find stock-picking complex or risky, he introduced ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) as a better starting point. An ETF bundles many stocks into one product. If one company drops, others compensate. He covered three examples: the Nifty 50 (India’s top 50 companies including Reliance, TCS, and Infosys), the NASDAQ 100 (top 100 US tech and growth firms), and the Eurostoxx 600 (600 largest European companies). Using a student named Yashita as an example, he showed that buying one unit of the Nifty 50 gives instant fractional ownership of all 50 companies, something that would be complicated and expensive to do individually.

The session covered asset classes beyond equities. Investing in forex (currency pair trading) is fluctuating in nature, that is, it is volatile; hence, it can give you good returns in the short term but not for wealth building. Cryptocurrency runs on blockchain and can swing sharply; Tiago said it is a real asset class but beginners should be careful. Gold has been a dependable store of value for centuries, particularly in times of uncertainty, and he noted that Indian women are among the world’s largest gold holders, partly due to the tradition of giving gold at weddings. Real estate works well long-term but requires substantial capital, heavy paperwork, and is difficult to liquidate quickly.

Then he mentioned non-traditional assets, and the room visibly perked up: vintage Porsche 911s, paintings, Rolex watches, designer handbags, stamps, Lego sets, and Pokemon cards. What makes these appreciate is rarity and demand. The students, many of whom collected Pokemon cards, suddenly saw their collections through a different lens.

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There are two ways to profit from stocks. Capital appreciation: buy at one price, sell at a higher one. Tiago used an example where Shesha buys 20 SBI shares at Rs 1,000 each, the price rises to Rs 1,200, and she earns Rs 200 per share, a 20 percent return. Dividends: some companies distribute profits directly to shareholders. Google pays USD 0.21 per share quarterly. On 10 shares, that is USD 2.10 every three months. Modest at first, substantial at scale. He also distinguished between accumulating companies (like Amazon, which reinvests all profits) and distributing companies (like McDonald‘s, which pays regular dividends).

On Indian tax rules, the breakdown was practical. Short-term capital gains (stocks sold within 12 months) are taxed at 20 percent. Long-term capital gains (held over 12 months) above Rs 1.25 lakh are taxed at 12.5 percent; gains below that threshold are tax-free. Dividend income is taxed according to your income slab, from 0 to 30 percent. Forex and crypto profits face a flat 30 percent tax. For students just beginning to invest, the Rs 1.25 lakh long-term exemption is particularly relevant because most early portfolios will fall well below that threshold.

Portfolio construction came down to one principle: diversification. Do not put everything in one place. Tiago broke it into three levels. Sector diversification: do not load entirely into technology just because you like tech. Mix in utilities, consumer goods, industrial companies. Geographic diversification: Indian stocks are a strong foundation, but adding US, European, or Asian exposure protects against India-specific risks. Asset-type diversification: combining stocks, ETFs, and gold creates balance based on personal risk tolerance. He also warned against over-diversification. Owning 50 stocks makes it impossible to follow all of them. Research suggests 15 to 20 holdings is manageable for most individual investors.

For getting started, he recommended three Indian brokerage platforms. Zerodha, the most established discount broker in India with strong educational resources. Groww, newer and mobile-first, popular with younger investors for its simplicity. Upstox, another established option with competitive charges. Students in the room also mentioned Angel One. His step-by-step advice: build an emergency fund first (3 to 6 months of expenses in a savings account), open a brokerage account and complete KYC, start small (even a few hundred rupees into an ETF counts), never invest money you need short-term, ignore social media promises of overnight crores (almost all are scams or cherry-picked stories), and invest consistently every month regardless of amount.