Figuring things out

Three months of asking “wait, but why?”

Hello, I’m Mridula and I’m 21 years old. I recently joined the team, and what follows is basically a dump of thoughts from the journey so far :)

A few days ago, I was on a Rapido ride back from the office when the driver asked me, “Ma’am, I know NSE and BSE. But what is MCX?”

I told him it was a commodity exchange. Just like stocks trade on an exchange, commodities such as gold and silver trade on MCX.

I was pleasantly surprised at myself. Three months ago, if someone had asked me the same question, I probably would have stared at them for a few seconds, said “yeah, yeah,” and gone down a Google rabbit hole later.

I came here straight out of college after spending four years studying biotech. I had traded here and there, but very little understanding of finance as a whole. Then I walked into a world where people casually spoke about yield curves, basis points, commodity exchanges, tariffs, FII flows and earnings as if these were completely normal things to know.

Naturally, it felt like everyone was speaking a language I had somehow missed learning. But if you’ve used Duolingo, learning a language from scratch is perhaps the most exciting cognitive skill you can try and gain.

The more I worked on The Daily Brief, the more it dawned on me that markets are only one part of a much bigger system. A company sits inside an industry, which sits inside an economy, which is tied to interest rates, currencies, commodities, consumption, regulation, geopolitics and a hundred other things I had barely thought about before.

So I started asking questions. What is a currency? What makes it valuable? Why does a regulation change the economics of an entire sector? Hell, what is money? And, most often, just: “Wait….but why?”

Because I’m new to all this, it probably explains the unreasonable number of questions I ask. They range from thoughtful to embarrassingly basic. But I realised that I wasn’t alone here, and everyone else went through this trough themselves before me.

Which is why nobody has ever made me feel like I shouldn’t ask.

A big part of that has been the people around me. Bhuvan, big Pranav, Manie, Kashish, Krishna, Vignesh, Kulsum and everyone else on the team have been ridiculously patient with all my questions, half-formed thoughts and “wait, but why?” moments.

Someone explains something, I ask another question, someone challenges the answer, and before you know it, we’re five questions deep into something none of us planned to discuss that morning and work is certainly a little delayed. But there’s no pressure to pretend you know everything.

Also, everyone has somehow tolerated the fact that I speak almost entirely in Gen Z. I will be discussing a development and then call it “lowkey insane,” describe something as mid, forget the actual word and say “thingy,” and use whatever internet vocabulary I have picked up that week. Nobody has asked me to start speaking like a functioning adult “yet”.

The work itself has changed quite a bit too. I started with writing, but writing here quickly became much more than putting sentences together. Researching a story means figuring out where a number came from, what the company said, what the underlying data shows, what changed, what didn’t, and whether the obvious explanation is the right one. Writing becomes the last step of thinking.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve also started taking up more of our short-form content which is still in the infant stage. I’ve also started writing the Weekly Tidbits. Tidbits has its own little fan base, which is very nice and also slightly terrifying because there are actual people waiting for you to find something interesting every week.

Points & Figures has been another rabbit hole. I started out thinking mostly about how a chart looks. Now I spend much more time asking what the chart is saying, which number matters and whether the visual is helping someone understand the story or just making data look pretty.

There is something incredibly fulfilling about untangling what initially looks complicated and then trying to put it back together in a way that makes sense to someone else.

I do it partly because I want to do the best work I possibly can, but selfishly, I want to learn more for my sake. There is an absurd amount I don’t know, but that has stopped feeling intimidating anymore. There is always someone who understands a subject better, has spent longer thinking about it, or can explain in two minutes what would take me two days to figure out alone.

I think I really like being around that. Three months in, I obviously haven’t “figured out finance”. I haven’t even figured out how much there is to figure out.

But who has? Meanwhile, I’m understanding more. I’m trying more things. I’m speaking up more. And slowly, things that once sounded completely alien are starting to make sense.

By the way, here are a few pieces that I’ve absolutely enjoyed going down the rabbit holes:

Three months down. A lot more to learn. And I genuinely can’t wait.