The question to ask about every piece of financial content

Including this one: how does the person telling me this get paid?

Not because paid content is automatically wrong — most of it isn’t — but because the answer predicts what the content will push you toward. A finfluencer (financial influencer: someone producing investment content for an audience, usually on social media, usually without a SEBI registration) is running a business. The product is rarely the advice. The advice is the funnel. This post walks through the funnel’s plumbing, the rules SEBI has put around it, and — since the same question applies here — how this blog is and isn’t paid.

No individuals are named. The structures are the point; the people change.

The five revenue models

1. Referral commissions. One of the largest, historically. A broker, trading app or investment platform pays a fee for every account opened through a link — often a flat amount per account, sometimes a share of the brokerage the referred client goes on to generate. Notice what that second kind rewards: not the client’s returns, but the client’s activity. SEBI’s August 2026 study put individual F&O traders’ transaction costs at about ₹25,000 crore in FY26 alone — roughly ₹1,00,000 crore over FY22–FY26, as the F&O post noted, with brokerage nearly half of it. A slice of that flows back to whoever brought the traders in. Content that makes derivatives look accessible, exciting and frequently profitable is worth more under this model than content that quotes the loss rate.

2. Paid courses and communities. A free feed of confident, simplified market commentary; a paid course, Telegram channel or “mentorship” behind it. The economics are excellent — near-zero marginal cost per student — and the incentive is to make the skill look learnable and the results look routine. Testimonials are selected. Losses aren’t screenshot.

3. Sponsored content and brand deals. A fund house, a fintech, an insurance seller or an NFO (new fund offer) pays for a mention, a review or an “explainer.” Sometimes disclosed with a small #ad; often not. The tell is content that reviews a product without ever finding a reason not to buy it.

4. Platform monetisation. Ad revenue and creator payouts scale with views. Views scale with certainty, urgency and drama — “this stock will double,” “sell everything before Monday.” Measured, hedged content is correct more often and watched far less. This is the mildest incentive on the list and still bends everything toward hype.

5. The pump. Buy a thinly traded small-cap, talk it up to a large audience, sell into the buying you created. Illegal under SEBI’s fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations, and regularly the subject of SEBI orders. It’s rarer than the other four and far more damaging when it happens, because the audience is the exit liquidity by design.

🧒 Explain it like I'm 10 (optional — skip if this is already clear)

Imagine a kid at school who gives everyone tips on which cricket cards to buy. He’s very confident and very popular.

What you don’t see: the card shop pays him ₹5 every time someone he sent buys a pack. So he wants you to buy lots of packs, often. Whether the cards turn out to be good doesn’t change his ₹5.

He’s not lying about liking cricket. He’s just not paid for being right. He’s paid for you buying.

What each model rewards

Model Paid for Content it favours Content it punishes
Referral commission Accounts opened, trades made “Anyone can trade,” derivatives, frequent activity Base rates, “do less”
Courses / communities Sign-ups Certainty, screenshots of wins, a learnable “system” Honest win/loss records
Sponsored content The sponsor’s product Product reviews with no downside Comparisons that favour a competitor, or nothing
Platform revenue Views Predictions, urgency, drama Hedged, slow, boring
The pump The exit A specific small stock, right now Anything after they’ve sold

Read the right-hand column. Almost everything this blog has spent seventy posts on — base rates, recovery times, why volatility is expensive, what ratios can’t tell you — sits there. That isn’t a coincidence and it isn’t a virtue. It’s that none of those things are monetisable through the models above, so nobody with those incentives produces them.

What SEBI has done

The regulator has moved on this in stages. The rules below are stated only at the level I’m confident of; a compliance professional would add detail.

  • Registration is the line. Giving investment advice or research recommendations for a fee requires registration as an Investment Adviser or Research Analyst. Unregistered persons doing so are in breach, and SEBI has passed orders against several, including disgorgement of fees.
  • Regulated entities can’t associate with them. Through amendments to its Intermediaries Regulations in force from 29 August 2024 (new Regulation 16A, notification SEBI/LAD-NRO/GN/2024/201; see the current text), SEBI prohibited its regulated intermediaries — brokers, fund houses, registered advisers — from having any association, including paying referral fees, with persons who give unregistered advice or make performance claims. This is the rule aimed at revenue model one. It cut off one of the largest funding sources for tip-based content at the intermediary end rather than trying to police every creator.
  • Education is carved out — with conditions. Explanation 4 to the same regulation says the ban doesn’t cover a person engaged in investor education, as long as that person doesn’t give advice or make return claims without SEBI’s permission. A SEBI circular of 29 January 2025 spelled out the conditions: no recommendations, no claims about returns, and no use of market price data from the preceding three months when naming a security. A circular of 8 May 2026 shortened that lag to thirty days, from 1 July 2026. This blog keeps the stricter three months: every market price and worked-example figure here is at least three months old. That lag isn’t a house style — it grew out of a condition SEBI attached to education content, and we’d rather sit well inside the line than on it.
  • Disclosure norms exist alongside. The Advertising Standards Council of India’s guidelines require influencers giving financial content to disclose material connections and, for advice, their registration. Enforcement is softer than SEBI’s, but the norm is on the record.

Two limits of all this. First, the rules govern what regulated entities may do; a creator funded by course sales and platform revenue is outside that perimeter, and both models remain fully legal. Second, the line between “education” and “recommendation” is a judgment. A post that explains a ratio using a named company’s numbers is education. The same post ending “and that’s why it’s a buy” is not. This blog lives on the first side of that line on purpose, and the line is the reason the disclaimer at the bottom of every post is identical.

This blog’s incentives

The same question, asked of Wealth Primer.

  • No referral links, no brokerage or platform partnerships. Nothing here earns money from you opening an account or making a trade.
  • No courses, no paid community, no sponsored posts.
  • No ads.
  • Analytics run on this site (Google Analytics), so I can see which posts are read. That’s disclosed on the privacy page.
  • A newsletter signup appears on posts. It’s free, and the only thing it earns is a reader who comes back. If that ever changes, it’ll be written here first.
  • Registration: I’m not a SEBI-registered Investment Adviser or Research Analyst, which is why nothing on this site is a recommendation and every real figure is lagged.

That’s the honest position: the blog’s incentive, today, is to be read and trusted, which is a real incentive and not a neutral one. It rewards being right over time and punishes being caught wrong. Given the alternatives in the table above, it’s the one I’d choose to be judged by — but you should know it’s there.

Common mistakes

  • Judging content by confidence. Confidence is what the revenue models reward. Hedging is what accuracy requires. They point opposite ways.
  • Treating “I’m not paid to say this” as the whole disclosure. Ask what they are paid for. Course sales and referral fees don’t need a sponsor.
  • Assuming a large audience is a track record. Audience measures distribution. Only a verifiable, complete record of calls — losses included — measures accuracy, and almost nobody publishes one.
  • Mistaking a screenshot for a statement. A P&L (profit and loss) screenshot shows one account, one period, selected by the person who benefits from your seeing it.
  • Concluding that all financial content is compromised. Plenty of it is useful. The point is to know the incentive before weighing the content, not to dismiss the content because an incentive exists.
  • Not asking the question of this blog. You should. The answer is above.

Takeaway: Financial content is mostly a funnel, and the funnel is paid by accounts opened, courses sold, sponsors served or views won — none of which reward being right, and all of which reward certainty, activity and drama. SEBI has cut off the referral pipe for unregistered advice and put a time lag on the market data education may use. Before weighing any tip, including anything here, ask how the person telling you gets paid.