YouTube Influencers And Broking Apps Draw In Millions Of Day Traders

One of the country’s top YouTube financial “influencers”, Prasad Lendwe.In November, when the country was in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, one of the country’s top YouTube financial “influencers” was met with an unusually large barrage of requests on his trip home.”My friends kept asking me how they could invest in mutual funds or equities — even a driver of an auto rickshaw asked me how he could set up a mutual fund with Rs 500 ($7) a month,” Prasad Lendwe told Bloomberg News of his trip from Hyderabad to Malkapur, a 300,000-strong city.”When I started my YouTube platform, no one was interested in stock investing and I had few followers,” added the 27-year-old MBA dropout who runs Hindi-language stock education channel FinnovationZ.In the US, couch-surfing investors have been enticed into spending their stimulus checks on Robinhood Markets Inc and other free trading platforms by forums like WallStreetBets on Reddit, creating a whole new generation of retail punters.But in India it’s been a wave of YouTube influencers like Lendwe as well as a host of private stock-tipping social media chat groups that have drawn millions of day traders into discount brokers like Zerodha Broking Ltd, Angel Broking Ltd and…
Read More