- Shankar Sharma suggests India needs a 5-10 year bear market for sustainable growth
- He compares India’s startup focus with countries excelling in deep technology and engineering
- Sharma argues bull markets promote high valuations in businesses with limited real value
Shankar Sharma, founder of GQuant Investech, argued on X that India may actually need a prolonged bear market lasting five to ten years to achieve real, sustainable growth. His comments come at a time when Indian equity markets have seen strong participation and a surge in startup funding for consumer-focused digital businesses.
Sharma drew a comparison between India's startup ecosystem and countries that have focused heavily on deep technology and engineering. Referring to Iran's progress in areas such as missile systems, drones and infrared tracking technology, he argued that the absence of a large stock market culture may have pushed more engineers and talent towards building real, tangible products rather than consumer apps.
According to Sharma, bull markets often attract capital into what he describes as “fluff" — businesses with high valuations but limited long-term economic value. These typically include businesses that command very high price-to-earnings multiples despite uncertain profitability. He believes easy money and rising markets encourage financial engineering and valuation-driven growth rather than innovation-led growth.
In a post on X, he said, "India's real teji will start when India has a 5-10 year bear market, and people go back to building real businesses instead of the fluff that gets billions of dollars of mkt cap these days."
Looking at the remarkable success of Iran's tech in missiles, drones, infrared tracking etc, I am convinced it's because they don't have a stock market. Their engineers build real products instead of food & lipstick apps for 500x PE.
— Shankar Sharma (@1shankarsharma) April 5, 2026
India's real teji will start when India has…
He further suggested that India's “real teji” — or true long-term bull run would begin only after a cleansing phase. A prolonged downturn, in his view, would push talent away from speculative ventures and towards manufacturing, engineering, research, and deep-tech sectors such as semiconductors, defence technology, electronics, and industrial innovation.
This isn't the first time that Sharma's comments have led to a debate online. Earlier this month, Radhika Gupta, MD & CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, took to social media platform X to rebut the market veteran's "brainwashed" jibe at SIP investors.
ALSO READ: 'Easy To Be Cynical': Radhika Gupta Rebuts Shankar Sharma's 'Brainwashed' Jibe At SIP Investors
Sharma reshared an oped he penned in 2025, titled: “How India created a generation of brainwashed investors. And the macro disaster this has created”. In the article, he criticised mutual funds investments, calling recent trends the “largest wealth transfer in history”. He also claimed this was happening with the active involvement of wealth managers, brokers and financial media.
Reacting to the post, Gupta said on X: “Markets go through cycles, with periods of excess, correction, and everything in between. Outcomes are never uniform. In times of correction, crisis or war, any data or statistic will favour the critic. In a rally, the opposite is true. The reality, as always, lies somewhere in between.”
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