Long Term vs. Short Term Investments: Ravi’s Grandfather & the MRF Shares Story

The share market is where people buy, sell, and exchange securities at constantly shifting prices. As those prices move over time, investors generally fall into one of two camps: those making short term investments and those making long term investments.

Both approaches involve the exact same shares, rising and falling the same way — what separates them isn’t the stock, it’s the investor’s time horizon and temperament.

An investor who sells as soon as a share turns a profit — because they anticipate the price may soon dip — is making a short term investment. This isn’t a poor strategy; it’s simply a different one. An investor who holds through the market’s ups and downs, resisting the urge to sell on every fluctuation, is making a long term investment — a choice, not a lack of awareness of the risk.

The MRF Story

There’s a story — widely shared in a Hindi-language video — that’s become a well-known example of long-term investing in India.

A man named Ravi called in to a stock market helpline to ask about the value of shares his grandfather had purchased back in 1990: 20,000 shares of MRF (the Chennai-based tyre manufacturer). Years earlier, Ravi’s grandfather had been paralyzed, and Ravi took on full responsibility for his medical care and recovery. Once his grandfather recovered, he gifted Ravi those 20,000 MRF shares as a gesture of gratitude.

Wanting to sell them, Ravi reached out to the helpline for guidance — and was told he’d first need to open a demat account to convert the physical shares before he could sell them on the exchange. The value of the holding, as reported in the video at the time, worked out to roughly ₹130 crore.

→ Related: What Is the Share Market?(#2) — more on demat accounts and how shares are held today.

Worth noting: MRF’s share price has only continued climbing since — as of mid-2026, it trades north of ₹1,30,000 per share, which would put 20,000 shares at somewhere around ₹260–270 crore today. If anything, the story has only gotten more dramatic with time — a fairly striking illustration of what three-plus decades of holding a strong company can do.

This is long-term investing in its purest form. It demands a level of patience most people don’t naturally have — and often, it takes years (or in this case, decades) to pay off.

So — Is Long Term Investing Actually Better?

Not necessarily, and not always. Long-term investments aren’t automatically safer or more profitable than short-term ones — they carry their own risks, including the possibility that a business underperforms or declines over the years it’s held. Plenty of short-term trades have outperformed long-term holds, and plenty of long-term holds have outperformed short-term trades. It largely comes down to the individual business and how it evolves over time.

Long-term investing is often associated with Delivery, while short-term investing is often associated with Intraday — though what we’re really discussing here is holding a share over an extended period, which typically falls under Delivery given how much riskier Intraday trading is by comparison.

→ Related: What Is Intraday & Delivery in Investing?(#5)

In short: short-term investments are held for a brief period, while long-term investments are held for an extended one — sometimes spanning years or decades, as in Ravi’s story.

There’s no formula that reliably predicts which approach will outperform in a given case — both have delivered strong (and weak) results depending on the business involved.

That said, for investors who’d rather not actively monitor the market and prefer a lower-stress approach to growing their money over time, long-term investing tends to be the more suitable path. As always, the golden rule applies: only invest money you can genuinely afford to have tied up for the long haul, or that you’re backing with real conviction in the company — that’s what keeps the process stress-free rather than anxiety-inducing.

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What’s your take — does Ravi’s story change how you think about long-term investing? Let us know.