Ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, often remembered as the Big Bull of the Indian stock market, is widely known for his investment philosophy that will continue to inspire generations to come. Investors often remember how the Warren Buffett of India made 20x returns on a Rs 1 crore investment overnight after the 1989 Budget.

In 1989, a thick cloud of anxiety hung over the Bombay Stock Exchange. The newly formed VP Singh’s government was preparing to present its first Union Budget under Finance Minister Madhu Dandavate. Dalal Street was gripped by panic, as most investors assumed the socialist-leaning coalition would announce an aggressively anti-business budget, slapping heavy taxes on corporations and crushing private enterprise.

Investors scrambled to unload their holdings, pushing the market down sharply. But amid the panic selling, 29-year-old Rakesh Jhunjhunwala saw something everyone else had missed. He believed that VP Singh, who had previously lowered tax rates and abolished estate duty during his stint as Finance Minister years earlier, was fundamentally pragmatist and business-aware. He was convinced the government would deliver a growth-oriented budget rather than a punitive one.

Deciding to stake everything on this single conviction, Jhunjhunwala went all-in. He aggressively bought up heavily discounted shares, most notably iron-ore exporter Sesa Goa. Going against the herd, he accumulated massive positions right into the peak of the pre-budget panic. By the time the Finance Minister stood up in Parliament, Jhunjhunwala’s portfolio was leveraged to the hilt, representing roughly Rs 1 crore to Rs 2 crore of net worth on the line.

When the budget details hit the wire, Jhunjhunwala’s thesis played out almost instantly. Far from a corporate nightmare, the 1989 budget was surprisingly rational and pro-growth. As this brought much-need relief to investors on Dalal Street, market witnessed a sharp rally.

Prices rocketed, and the very stocks the Street had dumped hours earlier surged in a frenzied buying spree. As the dust settled and the market recalibrated overnight, Jhunjhunwala’s bold leveraged bets paid off exponentially. His net worth multiplied virtually overnight, jumping from roughly Rs 1 crore to a whopping Rs 20 crore, eventually swelling to nearly Rs 50 crore over the following months as the rally matured.
Also read | Rakesh Jhunjhunwala death anniversary: 5 market lessons every investor should learn from the Big BullWhen Rakesh Jhunjhunwala recalled his overnight profits after 1989 budget

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala once recalled this episode during an event. “And then came Madhu Dhanwate’s Budget…People were so bearish but I was sure that you know..one thing that VP Singh will not give a budget that will hurt the business community. He was the man who first reduced rates of taxes, who abolished estate duty. Although he was a Thakur, he was a businessman. So I staked my life in that Budget. And I was worth Rs 1-Rs 1.5 crores and when the day of the budget, I was worth Rs 20 crores the next day. I stake my life. Right. And that’s how I made the real initial money,” he can be heard as saying in an old video.

What Rakesh Jhunjhunwala bought for his wife

“In 1989, on Budget day, I had Rs 1 crore and the next day I had Rs 20 crore,” he added. In another seminar, he recalled that after the massive market gain led to an unexpectedly simple first thought — buying an air conditioner for his wife, something she had long wished for since their marriage.

Starting his career with a humble Rs 5,000, Jhunjhunwala built a multi-billion dollar portfolio on Dalal Street. A qualified Chartered Accountant, he invested in both his own name and his wife, Rekha Jhunjhunwala. He favoured stocks in the finance, tech, retail and pharma sectors.

He passed away at the age of 62 on August 14, 2022, following a cardiac arrest. He was suffering from multiple health problems related to the heart, diabetes and kidney, according to sources. Also known as the Warren Buffett of India, his portfolio continues to remain among the ones widely tracked by investors.

Also read | Will Sensex, Nifty continue to bleed on Monday? 4 factors which will drive D-Street action this week

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

What Rakesh Jhunjhunwala bought for his wife

“In 1989, on Budget day, I had Rs 1 crore and the next day I had Rs 20 crore,” he added. In another seminar, he recalled that after the massive market gain led to an unexpectedly simple first thought — buying an air conditioner for his wife, something she had long wished for since their marriage.

Starting his career with a humble Rs 5,000, Jhunjhunwala built a multi-billion dollar portfolio on Dalal Street. A qualified Chartered Accountant, he invested in both his own name and his wife, Rekha Jhunjhunwala. He favoured stocks in the finance, tech, retail and pharma sectors.

He passed away at the age of 62 on August 14, 2022, following a cardiac arrest. He was suffering from multiple health problems related to the heart, diabetes and kidney, according to sources. Also known as the Warren Buffett of India, his portfolio continues to remain among the ones widely tracked by investors.

Also read | Will Sensex, Nifty continue to bleed on Monday? 4 factors which will drive D-Street action this week

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

NEW YORK — Wordle players faced a moderately challenging puzzle Sunday built around a specific culinary term, with Wordle No. 1884 leading solvers through a somewhat obscure food-related word before the correct answer came into view.

The word of the day was ASPIC, a noun referring to a savory jelly made from clarified meat, fish or vegetable stock, traditionally used to encase or garnish other foods in classic and often old-fashioned culinary presentations. Hint columns published ahead of the reveal described the word’s culinary meaning directly, while also noting its structural properties to help guide solvers without spelling out the answer outright.

Wordle, the daily word-guessing game created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 and later acquired by The New York Times, challenges players to identify a hidden five-letter word within six attempts. After each guess, tiles turn green if a letter is correct and in the right position, yellow if the letter appears elsewhere in the word, and gray if the letter does not appear in the word at all. A new puzzle resets daily at midnight in each player’s local time zone.

Sunday’s word carried a straightforward letter structure that nonetheless tripped up a number of players, largely because the word itself falls outside many solvers’ everyday vocabulary. ASPIC contains two vowels, A and I, alongside three consonants, S, P and C, with no repeated letters anywhere in the word. Puzzle-hint outlets noted the puzzle’s difficulty stemmed less from its letter pattern and more from the relative obscurity of the word itself, since aspic is a somewhat old-fashioned culinary term that has fallen out of common use in most modern kitchens.

The Mirror described Sunday’s puzzle as “moderately challenging,” a characterization echoed across several other hint columns covering the day’s word. Strategy guides published alongside the puzzle reminded players to avoid ruling out repeated letters too quickly in future puzzles, even though Sunday’s specific word contained none, and encouraged solvers to balance risk and certainty in their final guesses, favoring words that fit all previously confirmed letter constraints once only one or two attempts remained.

Multiple outlets suggested that players who correctly identified the word’s general category, a food-related term, could narrow down the field of possible five-letter culinary words more effectively than those guessing without any thematic anchor. Even so, hint columns acknowledged that aspic’s specific and somewhat niche definition likely caught out solvers who were unfamiliar with the dish, regardless of how effectively they had eliminated letters through their earlier guesses.

Wordle has grown into one of the most widely played online word games since its public debut in October 2021, spawning a broader suite of daily puzzles under the Times’ games umbrella, including Connections, Strands, the Mini Crossword and Quordle, a more demanding spinoff requiring players to solve four five-letter words simultaneously within nine attempts. Millions of players complete some or all of these puzzles each day as part of a now-familiar daily routine, often tracking personal win streaks that reset if a day’s puzzle is missed entirely.

The Times does not publish official difficulty ratings for individual Wordle puzzles, but third-party trackers analyzing aggregated player data described Sunday’s puzzle as landing on the tougher end of the spectrum, driven primarily by the specificity of the word’s definition rather than any particularly unusual letter arrangement. Puzzle-hint sites have increasingly taken to publishing running lists of five-letter words that have not yet appeared as Wordle answers, giving veteran players a resource for narrowing down potential future puzzles as the game’s archive of past answers continues to expand.

As with every Wordle puzzle, Sunday’s word will not repeat in future editions, and the game’s archive updates automatically at midnight local time with a new challenge. Players who missed Sunday’s puzzle can still access it, along with every previous day’s puzzle, through Wordle’s official online archive.

Sunday’s puzzle arrived as part of the broader daily slate of New York Times word games, including the standard Connections puzzle, the newer Connections: Sports Edition, and the Mini Crossword, all of which reset at midnight alongside Wordle. For many regular players, completing the full slate of daily puzzles in sequence each morning has become a fixture of their routine, a pattern the Times has continued to cultivate since folding Wordle into its broader games app.

Looking ahead, puzzle enthusiasts can expect Monday’s Wordle to reset at midnight local time with an entirely new five-letter challenge, continuing a daily cadence that has now stretched across more than 1,800 consecutive puzzles since the game’s original launch.

NEW YORK — Sunday’s edition of The New York Times’ Connections puzzle sent players through categories built around family relationship terms, participants in a deal or venture, live music performances, and literal English translations of early human species names, in a grid that puzzle columnists rated as one of the trickier entries in recent weeks thanks to a deliberate piano-themed decoy.

Connections, published daily by the Times as part of its expanding suite of word games, presents 16 words or phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a common theme, and the puzzle is color-coded by difficulty, with yellow generally representing the most straightforward category and purple the most challenging. Players are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends.

Sunday’s puzzle, numbered 1162, organized its 16 entries into four categories: words that modify family relationships, terms for a participant or party involved in something, synonyms for a live music performance, and literal translations of scientific names for early human species.

The yellow group, typically the easiest of the four, centered on prefixes commonly used to modify family relationship terms. It included “grand,” “great,” “half” and “step,” four words that combine with terms like “mother,” “aunt,” “sister” and “father” to describe extended or non-immediate family relationships. Puzzle commentary noted this category rewarded straightforward pattern recognition once solvers considered the words in the context of family terminology rather than their more common standalone meanings.

The green group asked players to identify words meaning a participant or party involved in some activity, deal or situation, linking “actor,” “agent,” “party” and “player.” Each word can describe someone taking part in a broader arrangement or event, whether in a business, legal or general sense, a category commentators noted required solvers to think beyond each word’s more common, narrower definition.

The blue category grouped synonyms for a live music performance, linking “concert,” “gig,” “set” and “show.” This category doubled as a deliberate trap for unwary solvers, since both “grand” and “concert” plausibly evoke piano terminology, “grand piano” and “concert piano” among them, a red herring several puzzle columnists admitted fell for on their first attempt. In reality, “concert” belonged to the performance category while “grand” belonged to the family-relationship group, meaning no piano-themed category existed in the puzzle at all.

The purple group, the day’s most difficult, required knowledge of anthropology and etymology. It linked “from Neander,” “handy,” “upright” and “wise,” each representing a literal English translation of part of a scientific species name associated with early human ancestors: Homo habilis translates roughly to “handy man,” Homo erectus to “upright man,” Homo sapiens to “wise man,” and Homo neanderthalensis to, roughly, “man from the Neander Valley,” a reference to the German valley where the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered. Puzzle site Nerdschalk described the category as centered on “characteristics associated with early humans,” while Parade advised players that a working knowledge of early human ancestry would prove essential to cracking the puzzle’s toughest group.

Forbes contributor Erik Kain, who covers Connections regularly, rated Sunday’s puzzle a 4 out of 5 on the outlet’s difficulty scale, noting he had briefly suspected it might reach the maximum difficulty rating before finally untangling the piano-themed red herrings separating the family and performance categories.

Connections has become one of the most closely followed entries in the Times’ games lineup since its 2023 launch, following the runaway success of Wordle, which the Times acquired the previous year. The puzzle rewards lateral thinking over straightforward vocabulary knowledge, since individual words can often plausibly belong to more than one category, a design choice intended to create red herrings that complicate early guesses. Sunday’s puzzle offered a particularly clean example of that design philosophy, using two words strongly associated with pianos to mislead solvers away from their actual, correct categories entirely.

Connections is written under the direction of the Times’ crossword editor, Wyna Liu, who oversees the game’s daily categories. Sunday’s puzzle arrived alongside the Times’ newer Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff produced in partnership with The Athletic that applies the same grouping format to sports-specific terminology, running each day alongside the standard puzzle rather than replacing it.

The Times does not disclose internal difficulty ratings for individual Connections puzzles, but outlets that publish daily hint columns generally rank each day’s difficulty based on reader feedback and common patterns of mistakes. Sunday’s puzzle was widely described as more challenging than average, with the deliberate piano misdirection and the specialized anthropological knowledge required for the purple category both cited as primary sources of difficulty.

Connections remains part of a broader daily routine for millions of puzzle enthusiasts who also complete Wordle, the Mini Crossword and Strands each morning, all of which reset at midnight in each player’s local time zone. Players who missed Sunday’s puzzle or want to revisit past solutions can access the Connections archive through the Times’ Games app for subscribers with All Access or Games-specific subscriptions. A new Connections puzzle, along with a new Connections: Sports Edition, Wordle and Mini Crossword, will be published at midnight Monday.