Chapter 11

The course sellers

Published 30 September 2026

Behind every wave of new traders is someone who told them trading was learnable, buyable, one course away. India's options boom grew an entire parallel industry of teachers - and the first time the regulator took one of the biggest teachers apart, the lesson turned out to be the product. This is the story of the settlement that told the whole country how the course economy works.

PR Sundar was, by the mid-2020s, one of the most recognizable faces in Indian trading content - a veteran options seller whose videos taught lakhs of viewers the vocabulary of premiums, strangles and adjustments. When SEBI moved against him in May 2023, CNBC-TV18 noted it was a first: the regulator acting against a finfluencer of his stature. The charge was not that his trades were bad. It was that the teaching was an unregistered business: SEBI's show-cause notices described advisory packages sold through his website, with fees collected through a payment gateway linked to his company, Mansun Consultancy - investment advice, sold to the public, without the registration the law requires.

The price of the lesson

The settlement tells you the size of the classroom. Sundar, Mansun Consultancy and co-promoter Mangayarkarasi Sundar agreed to pay about ₹6.55 crore to close the case: ₹46.8 lakh in settlement charges, and disgorgement of ₹6.08 crore - the fees collected, plus 12% annual interest running from June 2020. The three also accepted a one-year bar from the securities market. Six crore rupees of course fees. That is the number to hold onto: a single educator, selling advisory packages to retail traders, collected enough that the refund alone ran to more than the lifetime losses of three thousand average F&O traders.

Why the settlement mattered more than the sum

SEBI's order against Sundar was a settlement, not a conviction - he did not admit wrongdoing, and the case closed on payment and the bar. But its signal value was enormous. The settlement order is public on SEBI's own site, and its publication was the message: the regulator had noticed the course economy, and "education" would not automatically shield paid, packaged, individualized recommendation. For an industry that had grown up assuming the word "learning" was a legal force field, May 2023 was the year the force field flickered.

Notice the business model the order describes, because it became the template. Free content builds the audience. The audience is sold packages. The packages are called education, priced like advice, and delivered at scale through a payment gateway linked to a company. The teacher's credibility comes from trading; the teacher's income comes from teaching. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where the students' money lives.

The force field word

Every jurisdiction that regulates advice draws the same line, and every course industry learns to walk along it: "education" is free, "advice" is licensed. Say "this is how a strangle works" and you are a teacher. Say "sell this strangle on Thursday" and you are an advisor who needs a SEBI registration, with its capital requirements, its compliance audits, its fiduciary duties. The entire finfluencer economy is built inside the millimetre between those two sentences - close enough to advice to be worth paying for, far enough to be sold without a licence. The Sundar case was the regulator walking up to that line and saying: we can read the payment gateway. When the package has a price, a syllabus of recommendations, and a company collecting the fees, calling it education does not make it school.

What the students were actually buying

Strip the branding and a trading course is a peculiar product: the customer pays to enter a competition whose base rates are public, against opponents - the algorithms and proprietary desks whose dominance the regulator's own study measures - who do not take courses. The seller's incentive is not the student's outcome but the student's belief in an outcome, renewed monthly. Refunds are rare because failure is always attributable to the student's discipline, never the syllabus. And the market keeps delivering fresh students, because the broker apps and the ad networks and the referral chains deliver fresh dreamers, and the dreamers google "how to trade options" and land, by the lakh, in the same funnels. The course economy is not a parasite on the casino. It is the casino's marketing department, run at arm's length, paid directly by the marks.

The arithmetic nobody shows the students

Now place the course economy against the scoreboard the regulator published a year later. The student pays ₹25,000 or ₹50,000 for a course promising to make him a consistently profitable trader. The regulator's study says 7.2% of individual traders make any profit at all, and 1% clear ₹1 lakh in three years. The course cannot change those odds - no course ever has, or the study's numbers would look different - but the fee is certain, immediate, and non-refundable. The only guaranteed profit in the entire transaction is the teacher's. The student is buying a lottery ticket for a lottery he has already been losing, from a seller who gets paid before the ticket is scratched.

Sundar settled and returned. The industry he represented did not even pause - it professionalized. The next chapter of this economy was already running on YouTube at scale, with better production values, bigger promises, and a funnel pointed directly at the small-town first-timer. The regulator's next case made the Sundar file look gentle.