“My US brokerage account got frozen two months after I moved back to India.”
Angad Singh Chawla
Founder, Stealth
India→New York→San Francisco→India
Angad Singh Chawla is a graduate of NYU Stern School of Business. He spent two years in global finance, first as a Capital Markets Quant on JLL's Real Estate AI team in New York, and then as an Investment Banking Analyst at DC Advisory in San Francisco, working across Technology M&A and private placements.
In late 2024, he returned to India to build his own venture, and was selected for The Foundery, an entrepreneurship launchpad backed by Nikhil Kamath, Kishore Biyani, and Ronnie Screwvala.
You spent two years reading markets professionally. What did your own portfolio look like?
That is the ironic part. When you work in investment banking, there are strict compliance restrictions on what you can hold. I had some stock positions from before, but once I was in the role, I could essentially only buy ETFs. I had a Robinhood account with positions in it, but my hands were tied. You accept it while you are in the role and assume you will sort it out later. I never did. By October 2024, I had moved back to India.
And then what happened to the Robinhood account?
By December, it was frozen. Robinhood does not work for non-US residents. Once your residency changes, you are essentially locked out. I could see my holdings, but I could not trade.
The only option was to liquidate everything. That made no sense to me. You take a tax hit, exit positions at whatever the market is doing that day, and completely step out of global markets. Meanwhile, the market is moving every day and you are just watching. I wanted to stay invested internationally. So I started looking for platforms that would work for me as an Indian resident.
You must have had options. What brought you to Paasa?
Honestly, there are not a lot of options available, and I think that is still the case today.
Interactive Brokers is usually the default pick for most people in my situation, and I looked at it seriously. The platform works. But the India-side compliance is entirely on you - the FEMA filings, the tax obligations, everything that comes with holding foreign assets as an Indian resident. You are figuring all of that out yourself. When I came across Paasa, that was one of the first things that stood out. They handle that side of it.
But what made the decision was that I could talk to someone. When your account has just been frozen, that matters more than anything.
If someone in your NYU network messaged you and said they are planning to move back to India, what would you tell them about their US portfolio?
Start before you move. That is the single most important thing. Do not wait until you are in India and your account is frozen and you are trying to figure things out.
And when you are looking at platforms, do not just look at whether you can buy and sell. Think about the forex rates, taxation help, whether there is advisory, and whether you can actually get someone on the phone when something goes wrong. Those things do not seem important until you need them. And then they are the only things that matter.
