'IndiGo a good opportunity now'

For nearly three decades, market veteran Raamdeo Agrawal has published his annual Wealth Creation Study, a project that began in 1996 as a simple 25-slide statistical review that happened to spotlight Hero MotoCorp.

- Satish John & Dipti Sharma

In its early years, it was largely a data-gathering exercise with a few market observations. But by the mid-2000s, the study had evolved into a thematic exploration, shaped by the investment books Agrawal was immersed in at the time. Each year, one book—from Value Migration to Quality Investing—became the study’s anchor, tested rigorously against Indian market data.

Agrawal, the chairman and co-founder of Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd, broke down the highlights of this year’s study, shared his outlook on India for the next few years and explained why he’s convinced the country is only getting wealthier hereon.

The primary inspiration for this study comes from two books by Professor John Edmunds of Babson College—The Wealthy World (2001) and Brave New Wealth World (2003). Hence, the key takeaways from this year’s Wealth Creation Study are clear: the world is getting steadily wealthier, and India is getting wealthier even faster.

I read this book last year, and it completely changed the way I think about wealth. It shows how the idea of wealth has shifted over the last 300 years—from land, gold and palaces to what is essentially paper wealth. Today, people are not wealthy because they own vast estates; they're wealthy because their companies are valued at billions. Elon Musk doesn’t need gold or land—his wealth sits in the market cap (of Tesla).

The book basically argues that there’s no real limit to how much financial wealth can be created. Securitization has made it possible to “have your cake and eat it too”—you can own an asset, sell a part of it and keep expanding. That’s how the US has compounded wealth for over a century.

Amid wars and global chaos, his larger point still holds—financial wealth keeps rising unless the economic machine itself breaks down.