Bull markets spawn many cock-and-bull stories. Finfluencer Asmita Patel, who called herself the She-Wolf of the stock market, is a great example. The so-called ‘options queen’ used to run a school, Asmita Patel Global School of Trading, which despite claiming to manage a portfolio of Rs 140 crore and handling funds worth Rs 283 crore had a turnover of just Rs 15.27 crore, according to investigations by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). On the contrary, her courses collected total fees of Rs 104 crore during 2019-2024.
Clearly, she was making more money by teaching students to trade, instead of trading per se – her forte. That, at a time, when SEBI’s study has revealed that over 93% of individual traders in the futures and options segment (F&O) incurred losses between 2022 and 2024.
The school ran seven courses – Master’s in Price Action Trading, Let’s Make India Trade, Options Multiplier, Trend Following Income System, The Freedom Project, OneLife and Unleash The Trader Within – with the promise that students will recover the fees during the course through trading.
The courses were expensive, too – around Rs 7 lakh for a seven-month course. Post the GST of 18%, the cost came to Rs 8.26 lakh. To put these numbers in perspective, a two-year MBA course from the Indian Institute of Management costs around Rs 16-27 lakh.
The list of deceptions, according the market regulator’s interim report, is rather long. For one, providing a non-GST option for fees by depositing cash or through bank accounts of companies like King Traders, Gemini Enterprises and United Enterprises – all allegedly connected to Asmita Patel and her family. However, the school told SEBI that employees were siphoning off money.
Patel impressed upon students that trading was a better option than taking up job/business. She even asked them to exit mutual fund investments since they can identify multi-baggers themselves (“jo aap khud kar sakte ho”, she said).
Students were also encouraged to take loans for the course and even provided loan agreements. “Just make sure that you’re borrowing,” she said in one of the course. If you’re borrowing it, it should not be more than 18%.” And worse, students were told to use others’ money in case there was any shortage of capital.
“Stock market is one of the best business models in the world,” according to the transcript from one of her lectures. “No other business in the world can give the kind of money and peace that the stock market will give you,” she said.
Besides encouraging students to trade, she herself acted as a broker. In fact, if students already had accounts, they were asked to transfer those to her trading accounts, which was in clear violation of existing guidelines.
Through her social media channels, Patel advised enrolled participants to place orders on the options segment and had details like scrip name, trade details, type and lot size, entry range, notional target, final SL, status, stop loss, trigger price, etc. These were used on a regular basis during pre-trading and trading hours.
SEBI’s order said, “Providing stock-specific advice is quite clearly outside the scope of educational activity. It clearly falls within the domain of investment advisory/research analyst activity. Further, in this case, there are monitoring of investments, real-time communication of wrong trade, stop loss, etc. which clearly show that even before the issuance of this circular, the Noticee No. 1 (the school) was doing more than just educational activity, at least in the courses whose evidences are discussed in this order.”
Things came crashing down for students and they approached the regulator as they were unable to make the promised ‘40% per year guaranteed returns’ that was dangled in front of them, with the assurance that fees will be recovered during the course itself.
Forget returns, they incurred significant losses through stock-trading activities. According to SEBI’s order, students/investors/participants suffered losses in lakhs and crores while Patel made crores illegally without any authorisation from the markets regulator. To attract students, the school also shared fabricated success stories and deleted negative reports.
Last month, SEBI impounded Rs 53.67 crore from entities, including the school, Asmita Patel and her husband Jitesh Patel, and issued a show-cause notice as to why it should not direct to disgorge the amount of Rs 104.62 crore, along with interest, which also included fees from the courses offered by the school.
SEBI has come down heavily on this finfluencer and some other big names in the recent past. Moreover, its stringent guidelines are expected to make things difficult for finfluencers. However, the fact that the likes of Patel could con investors for 15 long years remains a worry.