“The cheapest tuition in the market is the one you pay in a simulator. Unfortunately, I didn’t find one — so I built it.” — Charanjot, after the third margin call
I’m a second-year engineering student at NIT Jalandhar. I didn’t grow up in a finance family. Everything I know about markets I learned the way most Indian retail traders learn it — by losing money on Zerodha at 2 a.m. while telling my parents I was “just studying for endsems.”
It started in my first semester. A senior’s friend dropped a small-cap ticker in a hostel WhatsApp group — “Target 2x in 2 weeks, bhai, pakka.” I put in ₹18,000 — basically my entire semester’s pocket money. The stock went up 14% in two days. I thought I’d cracked it. On day four it hit lower circuit. Day five, another lower circuit. I couldn’t even sell. I watched ₹18,000 become ₹6,400 in a week. I didn’t know what a stop-loss was. Nobody had told me.
After the loss I did what every YouTube video tells you — “paper trade for 90 days.” I opened TradingView’s demo, set up a ₹1,00,000 fake account, started clicking. Within a week I was ‘up’ 40% because I was taking absurd positions I’d never take with real money. There was no fear. The whole exercise felt like theatre. I closed the tab and went back to real capital, more confident than I had any right to be.
During Utkansh, NIT Jalandhar’s biggest inter-college cultural fest, I ended up backstage helping with the photography club. Around 1 a.m., between two band sets, a CSE senior started talking about algo trading — Python bots, Zerodha Kite Connect, mean-reversion on Bank Nifty. He made it sound like a printing press. I went back to BH-1 hostel and spent the next three weekends learning pandas, building an EMA-crossover strategy, backtesting on five years of historical data. The backtest showed +87% CAGR. I was 19. I thought I’d found cheat code.
I deployed with ₹42,000 of saved tuition money. In three weeks the bot took 61 trades and my account was down to ₹11,700. The backtest had been curve-fit to the past. Slippage, brokerage, and one bad gap morning on Bank Nifty ate every edge I thought I had. I’d been this careful — read the papers, optimised Sharpe, even added a volatility filter. None of it mattered, because I’d never felt a real drawdown before I’d taken one.
That’s when it hit me. You can’t learn risk management from a YouTube video. You can’t learn position sizing from a PDF. You can’t learn to spot a rug-pull from an Investopedia article. All of this is muscle memory — and muscle memory needs repetition with real consequences. Paper trading has no consequences. Real trading has consequences too expensive to pay tuition for.
There had to be a middle ground. Something that felt real — live prices, live news, behavioural traps, bot traders competing against you — but where the only thing you lose is your pride on a leaderboard. I looked. That product didn’t exist. Not in India, not anywhere, not free.
So I started building FinSim.
FinSim is not a game pretending to teach finance. It’s a finance simulator shaped like a game because that’s the only format that makes you return tomorrow. Every district is a lesson I wish I’d had — Scam Slum for the WhatsApp tip I fell for, Wall Street for the stop-loss nobody taught me, Quant Quarter for the backtest trap I walked into, Vegas Vice for the dopamine loop I didn’t know I was addicted to.
If this project saves even one 19-year-old from the ₹30,000 mistake I made, it was worth every one of the six-hundred-odd hours I’ve put into it so far. That’s the whole pitch.
Top 16 at Cheaper Marketless 6 — AI/UI for the absurd.
4th rank at HackMol 6.0 — AI injury-detection & recovery platform.
Top 100 India, Level SuperMind — LangChain + DataStax dashboard.
Google Solutions Challenge — AI wellness combining fitness + Ayurveda + yoga.
If you’ve lost money the same way — or if you teach finance and want to plug FinSim into your course — I’d love to hear from you.