In last 15 years, I have seen 4 'bull' and 3 severe 'bear' markets. A lot of people made a lot of money, but a much larger number of retail investors lost their life's savings in stock market scams.

In every bull market retail investors enter at end of bull market hoping to make a quick buck and in every bear market retail investors exit at the end of bear market tired of losing money.

To garner some solace for an aching soul and bank balance, the retail investors end blaming their losses on either 'bad luck' or the operators (brokers, etc).

It has been proven again and again that timing the stock market is not everyone's cup of tea. People use all kinds of techniques to forecast price movement of stocks on a daily basis and this can be difficult for retail investors to follow.

I was in constant search for some very easy methods to make money in the stock market. Methods where I would not have to apply my brains, but still be able to get returns high returns.

I tried various approaches like chasing hot stocks, tips, technical analyses, etc. But all this requires constant monitoring of the stock prices on a day-to-day basis. One needs to be very nimble at entering and exiting stocks. This may be easy for professional traders, but not for people like you and me who need to devote our time to our jobs.

It was then that I heard about SIPs (Systematic Investment Plans) from mutual funds.

Initially, I completely shrugged them off, thinking that it is just another marketing gimmick used by mutual funds to market their products so that their asset base can grow.

But returns shown by investment done through SIPs were consistently better then investments done at one go. In an SIP, you invest a fixed amount of money every month, irrespective of market movement. So you are able to get more shares at the bottom of market (when everyone is exiting) and less shares at the peak (when everyone is excited and buying stocks like crazy).

I thought of verifying returns by doing all kinds of calculations. My calculations will show you that I am terribly wrong in timing the stock market, but I had firm faith in SIPs' superior returns.

So I continued to invest even when everyone thought that the stock market was very risk y and no analyst was advising to stay invested in stock market.

The worst possible time to start investing can be at the peak of tech bubble (Feb-2000) when market was extremely overvalued and stock market was about to fall. Stock market was in bearish mode for next 3 years; still I generated good results as shown below.

For simplicity, I have done calculations for an index-based fund that invests in Sensex stocks. Below are details about each column.

• Every month, I invest Rs 10,000
• Units purchased = (Sensex value)/10,000.
• Total Units Accumulated are all units accumulated till date.
• Worth of investment = (Total units accumulated) * (Value of Sensex)
• Total money invested is shown by adding Rs 10,000 every month.
• Net profit/Loss = (Total Money Invested) – (Value of Investment)
• % Profit/ Loss = Profit or Loss shown in percentage.