Even asking this scares me, still asking, is there any guarantee of profit by investing in stock market? In 2003-04 we lost more than 10 lakhs. It pqrtially ended us. Anyone who has been able to continually book profit from market, please inform.
There is no guarantee of anything in the market, and i say this while being an active profitable trader.
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Most people will be better off by investing passively and not trying to trade and focus on their careers.
Just do SIP and invest for decades in simple Index funds such as based on Nifty50. Along with that one can have some sort of allocation plan between Equity and debt funds ( just simple high rated short term funds will do). This alone is good enough, you might get say 10-15% annualized returns over very long term. This has decent chance of beating inflation. Tradeoff is that equity can be very volatile and you can get crashes of 40-50% or more few times a decades and smaller ones more often.
Additionally, One can consider including long term gilt and gold as they might have some negative correlation vs equity and you can rebalance when market crashes and vv. And perhaps not be too focussed on Indian stocks only to reduce india specific risk if needed - so far i think it has not been so bad.
Dont invest to meet short term needs.
Dont sell on crashes. They can be good time to buy, but dont assume immediate recovery and/or no more crash after you buy. Best returns come after crashes.
Dont look too much on your returns day to day and get emotionally attached to the numbers ( and avoid making mistakes)
There is no guarantee of anything, as long as India keeps growing we might be fine. But we can have lost decades too ( i think 90s were like that for us )
freefincal is a good site to get more info/ideas.
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Investing on your own or even trading is a profession that needs skills ( and some luck helps too !). It takes years to gain useful knowledge and to convert them into skills and also to develop the neccesary probabilistic mindset and also to develop resiliance to last through tough periods.
Investing in bull markets ( just buy the dip ! ) might be somewhat easy (guessing) but real test comes when you get in stressful situations.
Not saying one should not do it, but one must be interested and be prepared to work and apply, not expect instant results, not be afraid of failures and not take too much risk. In fact in initial years, i think its best to keep capital small to lose less.