Madhusudan Kela: Money magician

Madhusudan Kela knows a thing or two about making money. He’s gone from cycling 30 km to attend college in a small town of Chhattisgarh to settling back in his Mercedes-Benz 320 on the drive to his multi-crore apartments in south Mumbai. And that’s all in the space of the last two decades or so.

It was no surprise, therefore, when last week Reliance Capital Ltd — part of the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group — appointed Kela as chief investment strategist. As the title suggests, his job will be to look at the big picture. He already has a tip for punters: “One should bet only on those stocks that have underperformed markets this year. If the index hits new highs going ahead, it would be on the back of these stocks,” predicts Kela.

For someone under whom the assets under management at Reliance Mutual Fund grew to a staggering Rs 1,00,000 crore from just Rs 200 crore in less than 10 years, Kela knew nothing about investing when he came to Mumbai in 1991. In fact, growing up in a small village in Kurud and studying in a Hindi-medium school, he had a tough time even getting admission to a B-school. Although he struggled through group discussions and interviews, Kela convinced the admissions committee at Somaiya Institute of Management Studies of his capabilities.

Today, his list of friends and mentors include billionaire investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Anil Ambani’s key confident, Amitabh Jhunjhunwala. It was the latter that hand-picked Kela to head Reliance MF when the industry was still at a nascent stage. Since then, he’s ridden every soar and tumble of the market and seen his every dream come true. But he still has one burning desire. “Even though I have seen many phases of stock markets in my 20-year career, I have an ultimate ambition: to predict that one big move — on which I can bet every single penny. This is what legends like Geroge Soros have done.”