Anshuman Mishra’s working day inside Bangalore’s Diamond District office building began when the sun rose over the City of London and ended just after lunch in Chicago. Mr Mishra held a new kind of job in this Indian city of call centres and tech groups. He was a futures trader seeking his fortune on western exchanges.

Supplied with Bloomberg terminals, stacks of analyst research, biryani and foreign capital, he and fellow young traders — graduates of the best Indian universities — learnt to decipher Federal Reserve statements and US oil inventory reports published 8,500 miles away in Washington. They watched from afar as Lehman Brothers failed, then coolly traded through the aftermath. One of Mr Mishra’s colleagues made so much money shorting crude oil in 2008 that he bought a string of flats around Bangalore.

“We were very in tune with what the rest of world was doing. It was a unique position, because I don’t think the rest of the world knew what we were doing,” recalls Mr Mishra, who traded US and European stock indices until 2009.