Who Are India's Biggest 'Bulls' and 'Bears'? A Guide to the Market's Best-Known Names
In 1985, a 25-year-old chartered accountant in Mumbai put ₹5,000 into the stock market.
By the time he passed away in 2022, that bet — compounded, reinvested and occasionally doubled down on — had turned into a fortune estimated at over ₹46,000 crores.
Everyone remembers his story.
Almost nobody remembers the man who, a decade earlier, made his money betting the market would fall — and once triggered a three-day shutdown of the Bombay Stock Exchange in the process.
Both stories are part of the same history.
This is a look at both sides of it: the bulls Dalal Street loves to talk about, and the bears it usually forgets.
What “Bull” and “Bear” Actually Mean Here
The Original “Big Bull” — and Why His Story Is a Warning, Not Just a Legend
Rakesh Jhunjhunwala — The Big Bull Who Redefined the Title
The Bear Cartel That Took On Dhirubhai Ambani — Dalal Street’s Best Untold Story
Why India Doesn’t Celebrate Its Bears the Way It Celebrates Its Bulls
What This Actually Means for You
Common Mistakes People Make Trying to Copy the “Big Bulls”
The Real Lesson From Dalal Street’s Legends
A bull believes prices will rise, so they buy and hold.
A bear believes prices will fall, so they sell borrowed shares now, hoping to buy them back cheaper later.
Neither is right or wrong by default — they’re just betting on opposite directions of the same market.
What separates the names in this article from everyone else is that they bet big, and were right often enough to become legends.
Before the title belonged to anyone else, “Big Bull” belonged to Harshad Mehta.
In the early 1990s, Mehta exploited loopholes in the banking system to pump crores into the stock market, driving the Sensex from around 1,200 to nearly 4,500 in barely a year — an astonishing run that made him a household name.
When the scheme unravelled in April 1992, the Sensex fell from 4,467 to 2,529 within months, a decline of more than 43%.
The affair is also why India’s markets look the way they do today.
It directly led to SEBI being given full statutory powers as the market’s regulator — the single biggest reform in Dalal Street’s modern history.
Myth: “Big Bull” always means a skilled long-term investor.
Reality: the title was first earned through fraud, not skill. That’s worth remembering every time it gets used to sell a stock tip.
Three decades later, a very different investor reclaimed the name — this time, largely without the scandal.
Rakesh Jhunjhunwala started trading in 1985 with ₹5,000 and built his fortune through his firm, Rare Enterprises.
His biggest and best-known bet was Titan Company, held for years through multiple market cycles rather than traded for quick profit.
He died on 14 August 2022 at the age of 62, following a cardiac arrest, with an estimated net worth of $5.8 billion — roughly ₹46,000–50,000 crore. India’s government awarded him the Padma Shri, posthumously, in 2023.
His record wasn’t spotless, and a good financial planner won’t pretend otherwise. In 2021, Jhunjhunwala, his wife Rekha, and eight others settled an alleged insider-trading case involving Aptech shares with SEBI, paying over ₹37 crore combined — without admitting or denying the charges, under SEBI’s consent settlement route.
That combination — a genuinely exceptional long-term record, alongside a regulatory settlement most retrospectives skip — is a more honest picture than the “India’s Warren Buffett” headlines usually give him.
His firm, Rare Enterprises, continues under his family’s stewardship today.
His wife, Rekha Jhunjhunwala, was ranked 28th on Forbes’ 2024 list of India’s 100 richest, with a net worth of $9.3 billion.
Jhunjhunwala wasn’t operating alone. A small circle of investors, most of them far less publicly visible, have quietly built comparable — and in one case, considerably larger — fortunes.
| Investor | Known As | Signature Approach | Disclosed Portfolio Value* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radhakishan Damani | “Mr. White and White” — founder of DMart | Deep value investing; started as a short-seller during the Mehta-era rally before turning long-term bull | ₹1.6–2.0 lakh crore (varies by source, Apr 2026) |
| Vijay Kedia | The Small-Cap King | SMILE framework — small in size, medium in experience, large in ambition, extra-large in market potential | ~₹1,375 crore disclosed holdings (2026) |
| Ashish Kacholia | The “Big Whale” of mid and small caps | Early identification of emerging small/mid-cap growth stories | ~₹3,000–3,400 crore (varies by source, 2026) |
| Mukul Agrawal | A closely tracked smart-money investor | Broad, actively managed portfolio (70+ disclosed holdings) | ~₹7,650 crore disclosed holdings (2026) |
| Ashish Dhawan | Private-equity pioneer turned public-market investor | Founder of ChrysCapital; large education-sector philanthropy | ~₹6,670 crore (2026) |
*Figures reflect publicly disclosed shareholdings tracked by portfolio platforms, not verified total personal net worth, and move with daily prices — treat them as an order of magnitude, not a precise number.
Here’s the honest answer: there isn’t a single, universally agreed successor.
Radhakishan Damani is the name cited most often — his DMart-driven fortune has, by most public estimates, overtaken what Jhunjhunwala left behind.
But Damani has always kept a far lower public profile, which is part of why the “Big Bull” title still feels attached to Jhunjhunwala’s memory rather than to anyone currently active.
If you see an article confidently naming “today’s Big Bull,” read it a little sceptically.
It’s usually one writer’s opinion, not an official title anyone holds.
Here’s the part of this history almost nobody tells you.
Long before Harshad Mehta, Dalal Street’s most feared trader wasn’t a bull at all. He was a bear — and he was known as the “Black Cobra.”
Manu Manek dominated Bombay’s stock exchange through the 1970s and ’80s using aggressive, coordinated short-selling — what traders of the time called “bear cartel” operations.
He would later go on to mentor two future legends, Radhakishan Damani and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.
In 1982, a Kolkata-based bear cartel decided to target Reliance Industries, short-selling roughly 11 lakh shares in an attempt to hammer its price down during the settlement period.
Dhirubhai Ambani didn’t just defend the stock. He fought back.
He rallied a group of friends and allies — remembered since as the “Friends of Reliance” — who bought up shares in a coordinated counter-move, squeezing the bears who couldn’t deliver the shares they’d sold short.
The standoff was so intense that the Bombay Stock Exchange shut trading for three days to let the outstanding trades get settled.
It’s arguably the single most dramatic bull-versus-bear standoff in Indian market history — and it happened a full decade before Harshad Mehta made the word “bull” famous.
Notice something about every bear in this article so far: none of them are household names the way Jhunjhunwala is.
Part of that is cultural. India’s retail investing story since the 1990s has been overwhelmingly a story of rising markets and rising optimism — there’s a natural audience for “how I turned ₹5,000 into a fortune,” and a much smaller one for “how I profited from a crash.”
Part of it is also regulatory memory. Bear-cartel operations through the 1970s–80s were largely undisclosed and unregulated, and it’s the association with market manipulation — not short-selling itself — that gave “bear” its slightly villainous reputation in Indian market folklore.
That’s changed. Since January 2024, SEBI’s short-selling framework allows all classes of investors — institutional and retail — to short sell, provided every position is disclosed.
The undisclosed “cartel” version of bear trading that Manu Manek practised simply isn’t legal anymore.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth behind every story in this article: none of it is a strategy you can copy.
Jhunjhunwala’s Titan bet worked because he understood one company, one sector and one cycle better than almost anyone else — and he was still wrong often enough along the way that few investors could have stomached his portfolio swings.
Manu Manek’s bear trades worked because he had capital, information and coordination that an individual investor, then or now, simply doesn’t have access to.
Trying to replicate either playbook with your own savings isn’t investing — it’s speculation wearing an investing costume.
The far more reliable version of “staying invested through the cycle,” which is really the one lesson every name in this article shares, is a disciplined SIP into a diversified portfolio, built around your own goals and risk appetite rather than someone else’s stock picks — and reviewed periodically with a Certified Financial Planner rather than a TV ticker.
It won’t make headlines. It’s also a lot less likely to wipe you out.
Every legendary bull and every forgotten bear in this story had one thing in common: conviction, held over years, not days.
The names change every decade. The discipline behind lasting wealth doesn’t.
If this history makes you curious about where your own long-term investing plan stands, a conversation with a Certified Financial Planner is a good place to find out — not to chase the next Big Bull, but to build a plan sized to your own goals.
Q1. Who is the biggest “Big Bull” in Indian stock market history?
By long-term track record and public recognition, it’s still Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, who turned ₹5,000 in 1985 into an estimated ₹46,000–50,000 crore fortune by the time he died in 2022. By current portfolio value, Radhakishan Damani’s holdings are now larger, though he’s far less publicly associated with the title.
Q2. Is Rakesh Jhunjhunwala a bull or a bear?
A bull. He was known for buying and holding quality businesses for years, most famously Titan Company, rather than betting on price declines.
Q3. Who is considered better — Harshad Mehta or Rakesh Jhunjhunwala?
They’re not really comparable. Mehta’s early-1990s rally was built on manipulating bank receipts and collapsed into one of India’s biggest financial scandals. Jhunjhunwala’s wealth came from disclosed, long-term equity bets over nearly four decades — alongside a smaller SEBI settlement of his own in 2021.
Q4. Who is today’s “Big Bull” of the Indian stock market?
There’s no official title-holder. Radhakishan Damani is the name cited most often given his disclosed portfolio size, but no single successor has broad public recognition the way Jhunjhunwala did.
Q5. Is there a famous “bear” of the Indian stock market?
Manu Manek, nicknamed the “Black Cobra,” was Dalal Street’s best-known short-seller through the 1970s and ’80s, and mentored both Radhakishan Damani and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala early in their careers.
Q6. Can an ordinary investor become the next “Big Bull” by copying these portfolios?
It’s very unlikely, and not a plan a financial planner would recommend. These investors had capital, research access and risk tolerance most individual investors don’t have. A diversified, goal-based investing plan is a far more reliable path to long-term wealth.
Q7. Did Rakesh Jhunjhunwala really earn ₹900 crores in a single hour?
This claim circulates widely online, tracing mainly to a 2021 social media video, but it isn’t confirmed by any dated financial-press report we could verify. Given the size of his Titan holding — worth roughly ₹7,295 crores in 2021 — a sharp single-day move in that one stock could plausibly swing his paper wealth by hundreds of crores. That’s a useful reminder in itself: paper gains on a concentrated holding aren’t the same as realised, spendable wealth.
Q8. What can retail investors actually learn from India’s big bulls and bears?
Not the stock picks — the discipline. Every name in this article held their conviction through multiple market cycles rather than reacting to every swing. That’s the one part of their approach an ordinary SIP investor can genuinely copy.
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