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GUIDELINES

This service is designed to fulfill your needs for safe and financially beneficial financial products at the right time, using our three resources of recommendations, tools and knowledge. These resources will also help you to stay away from investing in harmful financial products, which usually drag down long-term returns for most investors. Nevertheless, even after using these resources, if you have any queries, you can use this forum. However, while doing so, please bear in mind the following:

1. Confidentiality guaranteed: Your questions and answers cannot be viewed by others just as you cannot see those of other subscribers.

2. Information, not advice: All one-to-one queries would in the nature of information. They are not investment advice as defined by the Investment Adviser regulations of the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

3. Typical queries: Financial Products are complex. The pros and cons of different financial products leave us even more confused. We will clarify them for you.

4. View on existing portfoliolp: As you start your investment journey through us, do you need to know what should be done with what you have already invested in? You will get quick Hold or Sell recommendations but we will not be able to offer detailed explanations behind our recommendations. These would be our opinion on your investments, not investment advice, which would require a complete assessment of your entire financial situation as defined by IA regulations of SEBI.

5. Limitations: We may not be able to answer queries on non-financial matters or financial products that you have not bought and have only a theoretical interest in. We will not be able to answer questions on projects, financial products, stock ideas, formulae or theories of your choice, looking for better investment outcomes. We have done a lot of in-depth work on financial products that are beneficial and we are continuing to do so in your interests, which is reflected in our recommendations. We expect our members to take advantage of them and fix their finances, forever.

6. Keep the queries separate: Please do not combine queries of different topics such as insurance, stocks, tax etc. Please ensure queries are posted topic-wise because they go to different experts. If you combine queries under different topics, our response will get very delayed.

7. Other resources: Moneylife Foundation runs three helplines. For tax queries, go to http://moneylife.in/taxhelp , for credit card/ CIBIL scores, go to http://moneylife.in/credithelp and for legal issues go to http://moneylife.in/lrc

Important: The interactions in Ask / Handholding offers information on investment products and also clarifies your doubts about various financial products. It is a forum for information, not for advice.

Unfortunately, we keep getting questions about which specific stocks and funds to buy and sell and how much to buy, whether we can add additional money now that the market is down etc. We cannot answer these queries, due to stringent SEBI regulations. In fact, in a recent case of settlement, Stallion Asset, had to pay up a huge settlement penalty, even though experts feel the firm was not in the wrong. Please see https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/markets/research-analyst-cannot-provide-model-portfolio-services-sebi/article65411050.ece.

We believe the stock and fund selections, and timing service, that we provide is sufficient to build long-term wealth. We request you to kindly cooperate with us.


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Changes in Our Business Model
 
 
25th Sept 2020
 
Greetings from Moneylife Advisory Services
 
Between financial years 2019-21, SEBI has come up with extensive changes to investor advisor regulations. On Sep 23, 2020, SEBI had issued new additional guidelines. This comes just two months after extensive changes announced in July 2020. Earlier, in December 2019 there was an ad hoc circular
 
As a result of these changes, IAs, cannot accept fees through credit cards, will have to sign a 26-clause investor agreement, have to maintain physical record written & signed by client, telephone recording, emails, SMS messages and any other legally verifiable record for five years. IAs were already asked to record the suitability and rationale for every piece of advice given, sign them and store them for five years.
 
While these extensive and frequent changes, designed to strengthen the conduct of IAs are well-meaning, these have sharply increased compliance efforts and cost. We, being online advisors, find many of changes harder to implement, compared to advisors working in the physical space. We will have to have an army of advisors, administrative and tech staff to be compliant. If we do this, we will have to divert money to these areas and the cost of our service will double. We want to remain the least-cost service in the market to benefit more and more people. In the circumstances, we are forced to change our business model from “advisory” to “research”. This will mean the following:
 
What remains the same:
  • Recommendations on insurance, investment and Lion stocks, will continue as a part of the MAS premium subscription. Our strength has always been research and this will remain available to you through our recommendations.
  • The magazine and all textual content will remain as part of the service
  • We will have to suspend the restructuring tool.
 
What changes:
  • The interactions in Ask / Handholding will offer investment advice but not specific to your situation. It will offer information on investment products and also clarify your doubts about various financial products. It will be a forum for information, not for advice. This will be implemented with immediate effect and our guidelines in Ask, reflect this now.
 
Over the next few weeks our site and our communication to you will reflect these and other additional changes.
 
We feel this will not affect you much in terms of what really matters in investing: knowing what to buy and when to buy. This is our edge and it will still be available to you.
 
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Debashis Basu
Founder