In 2018 we dug out my grandfather's old physical share certificates. Actual paper. Some of them close to forty years old, just sitting there, forgotten for decades.
Sorting them out was a whole ordeal. Over those forty years the companies had merged, renamed themselves, split, restructured, changed hands. Untangling what those certificates had actually become took about eight months and one extremely patient CA who walked through every corporate action one by one.
Then came the number. Once everything was converted and dematerialized into the modern system, the final value was almost double what I had built up through years of my own active trading. Double.
Let that sit for a second. He bought some shares, did absolutely nothing, and forgot about them for forty years. I stared at screens, chased trades, stressed over expiries for years. And his do-nothing paper quietly beat my whole account. The man never checked a chart in his life and still out-invested me without trying.