1. What Was Avadhut Sathe Trading Academy Claiming?

According to SEBI, ASTAPL promoted itself as:

• A premier stock market training institute

• Teaching “price action”, “millionaire secrets”, “mentorship”, etc.

• With the message that anyone can become consistently profitable

They aggressively marketed via:

• YouTube & Instagram videos

• Paid webinars

• Testimonials showing inflated success stories

• Even a promotional video featuring a 12-year-old child claiming trading is “easy after training”

The academy charged fees ranging from:

Despite the claim of being a “training” company, SEBI found their activities to be investment advisory and research analysis without registration.

2. What Did SEBI Find in the Investigation?

SEBI’s investigation covered 2017 to 2025 and included:

• Search & seizure at ASTAPL offices and directors’ residences

• Review of live session recordings

• WhatsApp group messages

• Complaints filed by students

• Analysis of participant trading accounts

The findings were shocking:

(A) ASTA was giving direct stock tips

SEBI found multiple instances where Avadhut Sathe:

• Gave exact stock names

• Suggested buy/sell levels

• Specified stop-loss & target

• Predicted price movements for “tomorrow”

• Recommended futures & options strategies

• Showed his own live trades to induce students

• Asked participants to enter trades at specific levels

This is textbook investment advisory, not “education”.

(B) They used live market trading as a sales tool

Live trading was used to:

• Impress new students

• Make trading look easy

• Push them into upgrading to ₹6.75 lakh mentorship programs

In several sessions, students confirmed they took trades exactly as instructed.

(C) WhatsApp groups were used for paid stock advice

Mentorship groups (with 80–150 members each) received continuous messages such as:

• “Natural Gas 354 target if range breaks”

• “PFC great entry near 160, SL clear, ATH possible”

• “BHEL big target on downside below 40”

• “SBI bottom is in – 750 first target”

• “Nifty likely to break support and head towards 22,000”

This is full-scale advisory service, provided without a SEBI IA/RA registration.

(D) Misleading marketing and selective profit showcasing

SEBI found ASTAPL:

• Showed profitable trades, hiding losing trades

• Claimed all participants made money

• Encouraged students to take loans to pay fees

• Falsely portrayed unrealistic returns

• Overstated trainer expertise

But when SEBI analyzed actual participant trading data:

Almost all students were in net losses & claimed Market Guru himself made a loss of Rs.6,19,72,653.30 between 1st April 2024 & 30th Nov 2025.

(E) Massive fees collected from innocent investors

SEBI found significant revenue collection from thousands of students despite carrying out unregistered advisory, which is illegal.

The Power of Perspective

Finance professionals and informed investors always speak in terms of annualised returns. Why? Because that’s the only consistent and comparable way to evaluate performance across asset classes, time periods, and risk profiles.

Let’s look at what some long-term average annualised returns look like:

• Fixed Deposits: Inflation + 1%

• Gold: Inflation + 1.5%

• Real Estate: Inflation + 3%

• Equity (Mutual Funds/Stocks): Inflation + 7%

If a prime South Mumbai property, one of the most coveted real estate assets in the country, has only managed 11.3% annualised over 100 years — it puts a lot into perspective.

Insurance Commissions – A Family Affair

For life insurance policies sold by banks, up to 100% of the commission income comes from selling policies of related-party life insurance subsidiaries.

• HDFC Bank sells policies of HDFC Life Insurance

• Kotak Bank sells Kotak Life Insurance

This structure creates a strong conflict of interest. The bank doesn’t compare products across insurers — it simply sells its own group company’s policies, regardless of whether they are the best fit for the customer.

Mutual Fund Commissions – Even Worse

The trend is even more skewed when it comes to mutual fund distribution. In FY24, up to 99.1% of mutual fund commissions earned by banks came from their own related-party asset management companies (AMCs).

• SBI Bank sells mostly SBI Mutual Fund schemes

• Canara Bank earned 99.1% of its MF commissions by selling Canara Robeco MF

These are regular plans — loaded with commissions and higher costs — even when direct plans with zero commission are readily available online.

What Can You Do?

• Don’t blindly trust product suggestions from your bank RM or branch manager.

• Always ask whether there are direct alternatives to the investment or insurance product.

• Consult a SEBI-registered Investment Advisor, who works in your interest without earning commissions.

• Educate yourself before signing any policy or investment document.

⚠️ Already Invested in Such Products?

If you have already invested in these kinds of products and are struggling to deal with them, PVR Advisory is always happy to assist you. We help investors review, resolve, and recover from such financial decisions with unbiased advice and tailored strategies.

Final Thoughts

Banks and insurers are growing richer through a well-oiled model of internal cross-selling — while customers bear the brunt of expensive, misaligned products. What appears as “financial guidance” is often just a disguised sales pitch. Stay alert, ask questions, and never hesitate to say no.

Five Factors will be as follows:

1. Purchase/Entry Price
2. % of Portfolio to be allocated for that stock/call
3. Risk Absorption Capacity
4. Investment Tenure
5. Exit Price

Let’s see the two possible cases, in Case 1 with 30% positive returns of investment call, effect on SI portfolio will be just 0.45% whereas your portfolio will be increased by 12%. With the blessings of God, if there’s a positive return means this will be good. Instead if fortunes turn down and your investment made a negative return of 30% as mentioned in case 2, you may have to lost 12% of your portfolio value. I mentioned ‘With the blessings of God’ because this investment call is not yours, you’re just following SI. There won’t be any other option left for you rather than believing god and SI. I hope with this explanation, by now you understand the importance of this Portfolio Allocation Factor. If you have any doubts kindly contact me through comments below.

Risk Absorption Capacity: Kindly understand that this factor is completely subjective and each individual will have different risk absorption capacity. Normally any successful investor will do portfolio allocation with respect to his own risk profile and select companies suitable to his own risk profile only. So, if there a difference in his and your risk profiles, chances of earning money by following his investments calls will be diminished for you. Suppose if SI selected a stock by preparing himself to face even a 50% loss in that call, will you be also ready and prepared to face similar loss? And you cannot guess or predict how SI prepared himself for facing unavoidable losses.

Investment Tenure: Normally any successful investor (SI) will have his vision while selecting a company to invest in. This vision will be formulated by various factors like value migration, government policy changes, economical effect peculiar to the country/company, etc. And SI will have a clarity on how much time we should be provided to company to achieve his vision. With these calculations he will establish an Investment Tenure for that investment call. And I am sure SI’s will always be prepared to change this tenure at appropriate times with respect to changes in business environment. As you don’t have any clue on his vision or his calculations while formulating investment tenure, you can’t understand how much time you should wait/hold that investment. Normally SI’s will have a minimum of 7-10 years (Not mandatory) vision for each investment calls. So, here the question is will also wait/hold your investments for such longer tenures?

Exit Price: Even highly successful investors also will face lots of difficulty to decide this factor. Similar to knowing of SI’s investment call after company submitting the shareholding pattern to stock exchanges, Any SI’s exit or decrements in holdings in company X will be known only after company submitting the shareholding pattern to stock exchanges. I mean here also you will not receive fresh data. So, you may not get similar returns as SI.

So, by now you would have understood that your success while following SI’s will be dependent on your similarity of all the above factors with him. And in practical you can’t achieve similarity because majority of these factors were very subjective and no media company also can provide such inputs to you.

Even if there’s a difference in one single factor among all the factors discussed above your returns/success will be different from SI. So, I always suggest you to NOT TO FOLLOW ANY SUCCESSFUL INVESTOR. And I request you to kindly sit with a registered investment advisor (RIA) and discuss about your own financial goals, risk profile and analyse your own risk absorption capacity, etc. I am suggesting you to sit with RIA because his fees for providing this service will be very low compared to your loss if you fail while following SI’s investment calls without considering all these factors.

NOT ALL INVESTMENT CALLS OF SUCCESSFUL INVESTORS WERE SUCCESSFUL

Yes, its true. Kindly know about the investments of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s MTNL investment and Porinju velliyath’s Leel Electricals investment. And I can confidently say that they overcame these miserable flops successfully by following all the above factors very sincerely. Especially by ritually following the portfolio allocation factor with respect to their Risk Profile.

Note: There’s no definition for a successful investor, even this definition is also a subjective one. In my view any investor can be called as a successful investor if he can beat returns of benchmark indices over a period of 12-15 years.

Thanks for reading the article and let me know your feedback by commenting below. I request you to kindly share this article especially with the people who were making investments by following investment calls of successful investors and to the people who already lost money by following such investment calls.

Disclaimer:Investments in securities market are subject to market risks. Read all the related documents carefully before investing. Registration granted by SEBI, membership of BSE and certification from NISM in no way guarantee performance of the intermediary or provide any assurance of returns to investors.