I am building an AI agent for personal finance at https://teapawt.org/t.co/egtJagFcW2 Want to help? [email protected]
Jaipur, Rajasthan
Joined April 2009
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Truth is stranger than fiction.
Thousands of students at Allen Career Institute protested across its centres in Kota after the coaching institute allegedly failed to fulfil its promise of providing six laddus to each student before the Diwali break. Angry students took to the streets, created an Instagram page named ‘Laddu Janta Party’ and flooded social media with reels and memes over the issue. The protests reportedly escalated to the extent that the coaching management had to call the police to control the situation.
Meanwhile, some rival coaching institutes organised bhandaras offering unlimited sweets on Sunday, adding to the buzz around the controversy. Allen founder Brajesh Maheshwari reportedly made last-minute arrangements for laddus in an attempt to contain the situation.
Video: NCMIndiaa/X
#Kota #LadduProtest #StudentProtests #Diwali2026 #AllenCareerInstitute
Unfortunate to see people pile on Deepinder like that.
He is building a product and promoting it.
Don't like it - don't use it.
Never saw so many people speak out against far more obvious scientifically shady services like Astrotalk.
Apologies where they are due: last night, I should not have bucketed all Indian doctors into one single box. We work with so many of them. Even my elder brother is one of them.
All my emotion last night was directed at a few influencer doctors, who are more influencers than doctors. They did not read our research in detail, and spread twisted facts to call something new a scam. They get views by piling on us. They wouldn't do that to a startup doing the same thing from some other first-time founder, because it would not get them views.
That's actually more a reflection of their petty mindset, than other doctors, our country, or our team.
Happy Diwali everyone! Have a good one. Keep building. We have a long way to go.
Mutual fund trail commission: a lifetime fee for one-time advice by @mahambare_vidya
Such a perpetual fee defies logic. As for other services, there can be a fee schedule to pay distributors.
India’s regulations for varied investments require policymakers’ attention. One such aspect is of trail commissions that mutual fund distributors receive. There are two ways in which one can park savings in a mutual fund: through a regular plan or a direct one. A regular plan is bought through an intermediary such as a distributor, bank or brokerage firm. A direct plan is bought from the fund house or through online investment platforms, with no intermediary involved. The two plans hold the same portfolio. The only difference is the regular plan’s higher expense ratio on account of the intermediary’s commission and other distribution costs.
There is a clear case for paying for advice. Someone investing for the first time needs guidance on which fund to choose, how much to invest and for how long, and such advice cannot be free. The question, however, is whether the intermediary should be paid perpetually for advice that was given only once.
Under the current structure, the commission is built into the expense ratio, and no upfront commission is paid. It is deducted by the fund house for as long as the investor stays invested and is normally paid monthly to the intermediary. In essence, the intermediary earns income month-after-month, even for decades. The trail commission varies from one fund house to another and also by schemes.
Consider an example. An individual invests ₹5 lakh in a mutual fund scheme and stays invested for 10 years. Assume the scheme earns a gross return of 12.5% per annum. The direct plan has an expense ratio of 0.5% while the regular plan has an expense ratio of 1.5%. After 10 years, the direct plan is worth about ₹15.5 lakh and the regular plan about ₹14.2 lakh. A one-percentage-point difference per year costs the investor ₹1.33 lakh, close to a tenth of the wealth an individual would otherwise have.
This loss has two parts. About ₹88,000 is the additional expense charged on the regular plan. The bulk of it is trail commission paid to the distributor. The remaining ₹45,000 is the return this money would have earned had it remained invested. Because the fee is deducted silently from the portfolio value rather than billed separately, it goes largely unnoticed.
Behavioural finance research finds that investors respond to visible, upfront charges but largely ignore ongoing expenses deducted quietly from their investments, costs that are “out of sight, out of mind”. Add a status quo bias, or the tendency to stick with an earlier choice, and the regular plan incurs a cost that the investor neither notices nor acts on, something that the industry knows well.
The usual justification for continued trail commission is that the intermediary’s role also includes after-sales support for non-financial service requests such as updating nominations or bank account details, KYC updates and periodic portfolio reviews. But that doesn’t justify a perpetual trail commission.
An investor wishing to switch to the direct plan faces another hurdle. Indian tax law strangely treats a switch as a redemption followed by a fresh purchase, so it attracts capital gains tax. For equity funds, long-term gains above ₹1.25 lakh a year are taxed at 12.5%. For debt funds, the gains are taxed at the income tax slab rate for investments after April 2023 and without any exemptions, so the cost of switching to direct funds is even higher for those in higher tax brackets.
This tax is visible and painful, unlike the trail commission, and creates a lock-in. The longer an investor stays in a regular plan and the higher the investment, the larger the accumulated gain and the higher the tax cost of leaving. An investor can move to a new intermediary and save the trail commission for 12 months. Thereafter, the regular trail commission resumes, even if the new distributor has not provided any advice.
Policymakers and the industry should consider changes. First, rename regular plans as “indirect” plans so the label is clear. Second, after a set period, say two years, or once a fixed fee has been paid through the monthly commission route, an indirect plan should convert to the same scheme’s direct plan at zero cost: no tax, no exit load, and the expense ratio should fall. Third, distributors should earn commission only on fresh money, and only for those first two years. Money switched from another fund should not count. That would remove any reward for persuading a client to sell and repurchase.
Fourth, for any other services, there should be a fee schedule. Financial advice deserves to be paid for, but not forever or without an upper limit.
Stockal has said that investors on at least 2 more Indian platforms that invest abroad have had substantial losses.
Here is the complete list of Indian platforms associated with DriveWealth.
Stockal is saying two more platforms in India that use DriveWealth had issues and let to notional but substantial losses.
Waiting to see @Vested_finance and @INDmoneyApp deny or confirm it.
Ravi Handa retweeted
I am so proud that my daughter is settled in Helsinki, Finland.
AQI, Helsinki : 22
I am settled in Delhi
AQI, Delhi: 507
I have been a good parent. – at Delhi, India
Ravi Handa retweeted
You deal with financial terms every day, but can you solve this crossword?
Put your cash flow basics to the test with our latest crossword.
Tell us which clue made you pause: 1finance.co.in/crosswords
@ravihanda
#Crossword #PersonalFinance
The ₹100 Crore Stockal Case: How Investors' US Shares Were Sold Without Permission
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:30 What happened: a ₹29 Cr portfolio sold in 2 minutes
2:01 How the cash became available so quickly
3:31 Who is involved: HDFC Securities, Stockal, DriveWealth
5:41 Who is Stockal? Why company size matters
7:14 Was it a hack? Timeline and DriveWealth's letter
10:38 How this kind of scam works, the FIR and open questions
13:45 Similar cases and how to protect yourself
Nearly ₹100 crore worth of US stock holdings allegedly sold without investors’ permission.
In this video, I discuss the Stockal case, the parties involved, what DriveWealth’s letter says, and the steps investors can take to reduce their risk.
Watch here: youtu.be/uJKoc-PhGus?si=d4jL…
What can one person do?
Well, a lot.
She should be awarded and rewarded.
दिल्ली पुलिस की एक महिला हेड कॉन्स्टेबल ने ऐसा काम किया है, जिसने कई परिवारों के चेहरों पर फिर से मुस्कान लौटा दी है. दक्षिण-पूर्वी जिले के जैतपुर थाने में तैनात महिला हेड कॉन्स्टेबल चंचल ने महज 12 महीनों में 119 लापता बच्चों को तलाश कर उनके परिवारों तक पहुंचाया है. इसके अलावा उन्होंने 16 अन्य लापता लोगों को भी खोज निकाला है.
#DelhiPolice #HeadConstable #MissingChildren #NDTVIndia
We are all lonely.
We keep ourselves occupied in pursuit of goals (family / career / money / craft) so that we don't have to deal with the loneliness.
Whiling the time away on WhatsApp is not worse than anything else. It keeps you distracted from the absurdity of life.
Ravi Handa retweeted
II think middle-class Indians should seriously consider moving out of India on a massive scale.
India built only for the poor. You get just one life. Give yourself and your children a chance at a better quality of life.
On the Stockal case: First of all, you need to accept that you cannot avoid fraud / scam. You can only reduce the probability of the same.
Mistakes in this specific case -
a) When HDFC securities moved from stockal to vested, investors should have.
b) Hdfc, stockal, drive - 3 points of failure. Should have been one.
c) Stockal has a revenue of 12 cr. Keeping 30 cr of funds with them is ridiculous. Bigger players should have been used.
What can you and I do -
a) Go directly with a big player like IBKR.
b) Take the better regulated and costlier route of GIFT city
Also, it is not necessary to invest in everything. If it concerns you, you can easily avoid investing in international stocks altogether.
A large portion of Indian population does not even invest in equity. Just FD / real estate also works out fine.
Have recorded a detailed video on the same. Should be able to release it tonight / tomorrow.
