Our Learning Paths
Rigorous, high-density courses built for quick scanning and faster decisions. Filter by strategy and find your edge.
Stock Market Basics
21 courses
Advanced Bond Valuation: Credit Spreads and the Yield Curve
An advanced, India-first course on the two things a single yield to maturity hides: the term structure of interest rates and the credit spread. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs who can already price a bond and compute duration, and now want to bootstrap a zero-coupon curve from G-Sec prices, extract forward rates, read curve shapes and curve trades, decompose a corporate bond's spread into default, recovery, liquidity, and tax components, and value any bond cash flow by cash flow off the curve plus a spread. Uses FBIL and CCIL data, NSE and BSE corporate bond quotes, RBI Retail Direct, debt fund factsheets, and real Indian credit events including IL&FS, DHFL, and the 2020 credit risk fund episode, with every calculation worked in INR.
- Bootstrap a zero-coupon spot curve from G-Sec prices and explain why YTM is a blunt average that spot rates sharpen
- Compute implied forward rates and read what the curve is pricing about future RBI repo decisions
- Identify normal, flat, inverted, and humped curves and express a curve view using gilt, constant maturity, and target maturity funds
Advanced Portfolio Construction: Factor Investing and Smart Beta
A practitioner's course on factor investing for experienced Indian investors who already run a portfolio and want a more deliberate way to construct it. Covers what a factor actually is, how value, momentum, quality, low volatility, size, and dividend yield have behaved on the NSE, how to read the methodology of every major Nifty smart beta index and the funds that track them, and how to combine factors into a multi-factor portfolio around a Nifty 50 core. Closes with the operational realities: turnover, transaction costs on Indian brokers, capital gains tax drag, rebalancing discipline, and regression-based monitoring of your own factor exposure. Built on Screener.in screens, NSE index data, and real Indian fund examples throughout.
- Separate market beta, factor exposure, and genuine alpha in any portfolio, including your own
- Build value, momentum, quality, and low volatility screens on Screener.in that match how NSE factor indices are actually constructed
- Read a Nifty smart beta index methodology document and judge whether the fund tracking it is worth owning
Advanced Screener.in: Custom Formulas and Forensic Screens
For investors who already write basic Screener.in queries and want screens that hold up. The first half is about writing formulas properly: handling nulls, zero denominators and negative values, building composite scores in one query, and testing multi-year consistency. The second half turns those skills into forensic screens: cash conversion, accruals, other income dependence, capitalisation creep, receivable and inventory build-ups, the cash-and-debt paradox, Piotroski and Beneish style scoring, and promoter pledge and dilution filters. It closes by testing screens against real Indian collapses such as DHFL, Manpasand and Yes Bank, and by building a quarterly review routine that separates genuine red flags from false positives.
- Write Screener.in queries that handle nulls, zero denominators and negative values without silently dropping companies
- Combine several conditions into a single composite score inside one query
- Screen for poor earnings quality using cumulative cash conversion, accruals and other income dependence
Building Automated Excel Models Linked to Live Market Data
An advanced build course for investors and active traders who already live in Excel and are tired of copy-pasting prices. You will design models in three layers (raw data, calculation engine, output), then feed them from real sources: Excel Stock Data Types and STOCKHISTORY, Power Query pulls of NSE bhavcopy, AMFI NAVs and RBI rates, and real-time broker feeds from Zerodha Kite Connect through Python. On top of that data you will build five working models: a live peer valuation sheet, a reverse DCF that recalculates implied growth as the price moves, a Nifty options chain with Black-Scholes Greeks, a rolling portfolio risk dashboard, and a position sizing calculator. Finally you will automate refreshes, snapshots and alerts with VBA, Office Scripts and Python, and harden the whole thing with audit checks, performance tuning and a maintenance playbook for corporate actions and index changes.
- Design live models in three layers so a broken feed never corrupts your calculations
- Choose between Stock Data Types, Power Query, RTD and broker APIs based on latency, cost and reliability
- Pull NSE bhavcopy, AMFI NAVs and RBI rates with parameterised Power Query that refreshes on a schedule
Building a Concentrated High Conviction Portfolio
A rigorous guide to building and running a concentrated equity portfolio in Indian markets, built for experienced investors who have outgrown a 40-stock spread and want their best ideas to actually matter. Learn why diversification stops adding much beyond 15 to 20 stocks, what the Kelly criterion and its practical half-Kelly version say about position sizing, and the temperament and capital tests that decide whether concentration is right for you at all. Go deep on how conviction is actually built: writing a one-page thesis, identifying your variant perception versus the Nifty consensus, and setting kill criteria before you buy. Then construct the book itself: how many stocks, sizing by conviction tiers, spotting correlation traps where ten NSE stocks behave like three, and staggered versus lump-sum entry. Finish with the discipline that keeps a concentrated portfolio alive: quarterly thesis reviews, rules for trimming and adding, and the real tax and cost drag of churn under Indian LTCG and STCG rules.
- Size positions using conviction tiers and a half-Kelly framework instead of equal weights
- Write a one-page thesis with explicit kill criteria before committing capital
- Spot correlation traps and run a quarterly review process that avoids overtrading
Building a Personal Research Dashboard Using Python and Free APIs
A build course for investors and active traders who already write basic Python and are tired of stitching research together from screener.in, NSE, BSE, AMFI and a dozen broker screens. You will design and build one private research dashboard on free data: NSE bhavcopy and delivery data, yfinance prices, AMFI and mfapi.in NAVs, BSE and NSE corporate filings, and RBI macro series. You will store it all in a local DuckDB database, adjust for splits and bonuses, and run data quality checks that catch silent errors. On top of that data you will build valuation bands, relative strength versus the Nifty 50, portfolio XIRR and drawdown, and a transparent watchlist score. Then you will ship it as a Streamlit app with Plotly charts, schedule daily refreshes, send Telegram alerts on filings and price triggers, and keep the whole system running when free sources change. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNI investors who want a research process they own end to end.
- How to decide what a research dashboard should answer before writing a single line of code
- Which free Indian market data sources are reliable, what each one cannot tell you, and how to use them within their terms
- How to build a fetch, store, compute, display architecture that survives source outages and format changes
Case Study: Bhushan Steel, Insolvency and Resolution Under IBC
Bhushan Steel borrowed its way into becoming one of India's largest secondary steel producers, then collapsed under more than 56,000 crore rupees of claims and became one of the twelve accounts RBI ordered banks to drag to the National Company Law Tribunal in 2017. Within a year, Tata Steel had bought it through the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, lenders had recovered roughly 63 percent of their admitted claims, and the promoters had been locked out by the new Section 29A. This case study rebuilds the whole arc: the balance sheet red flags that were visible years in advance, the broken recovery system IBC replaced, the CIRP process step by step, the bidding war with JSW Steel, what actually happened to lenders, operational creditors and public shareholders, and the fraud investigation that followed. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNIs who want to read insolvency situations on NSE and BSE with clear eyes instead of chasing them.
- Spot the balance sheet warning signs in Bhushan Steel's annual reports years before default: interest cover, capital work in progress, debt to EBITDA and related party flows
- Explain why SICA, BIFR, DRTs, SARFAESI and CDR failed to resolve bad loans, and what RBI's Asset Quality Review and the dirty dozen list changed
- Walk through the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process from NCLT admission to plan approval, including the moratorium, the resolution professional and Committee of Creditors voting
Case Study: DHFL, Forensic Red Flags Before the Collapse
A forensic case study of Dewan Housing Finance Corporation, the AAA-rated housing finance company that went from a ₹690 stock and a ₹1 lakh crore loan book in 2018 to default, RBI supersession, and the first financial firm ever resolved under the IBC. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs who want to learn how to see the next DHFL before the rating agencies do. Works through the annual reports, quarterly disclosures, shareholding patterns, auditor reports, bond yields, and mutual fund holdings that were public before the collapse, and shows which red flags were visible, which were hidden, and what each one should have made you do. Covers the asset liability mismatch, developer loans dressed up as retail, shell company lending, related party and circular funding, the fictitious Bandra branch, auditor and rating agency lag, the September 2018 crash, the June 2019 default, and the Piramal resolution. Ends with a reusable NBFC and HFC forensic checklist applied to a live-style example using Screener.in and exchange filings.
Case Study: Future Group's Debt Spiral and Governance Failures
An advanced case study that reconstructs the collapse of Kishore Biyani's Future Group from the investor's chair. You will trace how a retail empire built on Big Bazaar and Pantaloons was financed with escalating debt, promoter pledges and a web of listed group companies, why the Amazon and Reliance transactions of 2019 to 2022 turned into a courtroom war, and how the default, the failed one-time restructuring and the insolvency process wiped out equity holders. Every chapter converts the story into tools: leverage ratios that lease accounting hides, pledge disclosures on NSE and BSE, related party tests, and a governance checklist you can run on any promoter-led company on screener.in today.
- How Future Group grew from one Pantaloons store to over 1,500 outlets and why that growth was financed almost entirely with borrowed money
- How to compute true leverage for a retailer once Ind AS 116 lease liabilities, group guarantees and asset-holding companies are put back on the balance sheet
- How promoter share pledges work, where to find them in NSE and BSE disclosures, and why pledge invocations in 2019 and 2020 marked the point of no return
Case Study: HDFC Bank Bulk Deal Activity Around Key Events
An event-by-event study of how large money moved in and out of HDFC Bank, India's most widely held private bank and one of the heaviest weights in the Nifty 50. Start with SEBI's rules for bulk and block deals and discover why the 0.5% bulk deal threshold almost never triggers for a stock this large, so the real footprints sit in block deal windows, FII and DII flow data and quarterly shareholding patterns. Then walk through the HDFC merger, the January 2024 results sell-off, LIC's approval to go up to 9.99% and MSCI's foreign inclusion factor changes, reading the NSE and BSE disclosures around each one. Finish with a repeatable playbook and checklist for studying large-deal activity around events in any Indian large cap.
- Tell bulk deals, block deals and ordinary large trades apart using SEBI's definitions and disclosure rules
- Explain why mega caps like HDFC Bank rarely appear in bulk deal data and where their large trades show up instead
- Pull and read bulk deal, block deal, FII/DII and shareholding data from NSE, BSE and screener.in
Case Study: IL&FS Crisis and Its Systemic Ripple Effects
A forensic walkthrough of the Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services collapse of 2018, the default that turned a single lender's balance sheet problem into a system-wide credit freeze. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNIs, the course dissects how a company owned by LIC, SBI, HDFC and ORIX grew into a web of more than 300 entities, funded long-gestation infrastructure projects with short-term borrowing, and kept a AAA rating until weeks before it defaulted. It then traces the contagion: the commercial paper market seizing up, debt mutual funds marking down holdings, the DHFL sell-off on NSE, and the second-order damage that ran through Reliance Capital and the Franklin Templeton wind-up. It closes with the regulatory response from RBI, SEBI and the government, and practical frameworks for stress-testing NBFC stocks and debt funds in your own portfolio.
- Explain how IL&FS's ownership, group structure and funding model created a hidden asset-liability mismatch
- Read the warning signs in IL&FS's own annual reports and rating rationales that were visible before the 2018 defaults
- Trace how one default spread through the commercial paper market, debt mutual funds and listed NBFC stocks
Practice Drills: Analyzing Promoter Pledge Disclosures
A practice-first course built around the actual documents. You already know what promoter pledging is and why it can go wrong; here you work the filings themselves. You pull every pledge related disclosure for a stock from NSE, BSE and screener.in, then decode SAST Regulation 31 encumbrance disclosures, release and invocation filings, the encumbrance columns of the quarterly shareholding pattern, the reasons-for-encumbrance disclosure and non-disposal undertakings. Then you do the numbers: aggregate pledges across promoter group entities, build a quarterly pledge trend, estimate the share price at which lenders start calling margin, and test whether the market could absorb a forced sale. The final chapter trains judgment: reconciling numbers that disagree across filings, classifying sample disclosures as routine or distress, and a capstone review of one sample company end to end. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNI investors who hold mid and small caps where pledge risk actually bites.
- Locate every pledge, release, invocation and encumbrance filing for a listed Indian company on NSE, BSE and screener.in
- Read a SAST Regulation 31 encumbrance disclosure field by field and tell creation, release and invocation apart
- Extract pledged and encumbered holdings from the quarterly shareholding pattern and reconcile them with event disclosures
Practice Drills: Backtesting a Contrarian Sector Rotation Strategy
An advanced hands-on drill for building, stress-testing, and implementing a contrarian sector rotation strategy on Nifty sectoral indices. You will write a precise rulebook, assemble clean TRI data from niftyindices.com, code a monthly rotation backtest in Python without lookahead bias, net out Indian costs and capital gains tax, and then try hard to break your own result before a single rupee goes in.
- How mean reversion across Nifty sectoral indices can be turned into a testable contrarian rule
- How to source and clean sectoral TRI data while handling launch dates and survivorship
- How to rank sectors and generate monthly signals in Python without lookahead bias
Practice Drills: Building a Factor Based Stock Screen
A practice-first course for investors who already know what factors are and now want to build a working multi-factor screen. You will define a clean NSE universe, turn raw ratios into comparable factor scores, build value, quality, momentum and low-volatility scores one drill at a time, combine them into a composite rank, and pressure-test the result against NSE factor indices, turnover and Indian transaction costs and taxes.
- How to define a tradeable NSE universe free of liquidity and survivorship traps
- How to convert raw ratios into percentile ranks and z-scores so factors can be compared
- How to build value, quality, momentum and low-volatility scores step by step
Practice Drills: Constructing a Concentrated High Conviction Portfolio
A hands-on drill course for experienced investors who already understand the case for concentration and now need to execute it without blowing up. You will measure how much diversification your current portfolio actually buys, size positions with a half-Kelly framework using realistic win and loss estimates, and run the temperament and capital tests honestly. Then build conviction the hard way: write a one-page thesis on an NSE stock, reverse-engineer what the current price already assumes, and set measurable kill criteria before you buy. Construct a 12-stock book by conviction tiers, hunt down correlation traps and hidden factor bets, and plan a staggered entry. Finish by running a quarterly thesis review, making trim, add and exit decisions on a drifted portfolio, pricing the LTCG, STCG and cost drag of churn, stress-testing the book against March 2020 and 2008, and building a Rs 25 lakh concentrated portfolio end to end. Every drill uses Indian companies, NSE and BSE data, and INR figures.
- Measure the effective number of stocks in a portfolio and see how much diversification you really hold
- Size positions with half-Kelly and conviction tiers instead of equal weights
- Write a one-page thesis, run a reverse DCF and set measurable kill criteria before buying
Practice Drills: Reading IBC Resolution Filings for Investment Signals
A practice-first companion to the Bhushan Steel IBC case study. You already know how the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process works; this course makes you read the paperwork it produces and act on it. Working with NSE and BSE Regulation 30 disclosures, NCLT orders, IBBI records, resolution professionals' public announcements and CoC-approved plan filings, you will drill what each document reveals about recovery, timeline risk and, above all, what happens to the listed equity. You will learn to separate a stock that is cheap from a stock that is about to be written down to zero, read signals for the acquirer and the lending banks, and avoid the low-float traps that follow a resolution. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNIs who want a repeatable method for reading insolvency situations instead of gambling on them.
- Locate every IBC filing that matters for a listed company across NSE, BSE, NCLT and IBBI, and log it in a case tracker you build yourself
- Read Section 7, 9 and 10 admission orders and pull out the default amount, the petitioner and the signals hidden in the order's reasoning
- Use the public announcement and the list of creditors to size admitted claims against what the business could realistically be worth
Practice Drills: Tracking and Interpreting Bulk and Block Deals
A practice-first companion to Understanding Insider Trading Regulations and Bulk Deal Data. Instead of more theory, you work the raw data: pull bulk and block deals from the NSE and BSE large deals pages, classify each trade against SEBI's rules, and log it in a Google Sheets tracker. Then you learn to read the counterparty, size the deal against equity, free float and average volume, price it against VWAP and the previous close, and connect it to shareholding pattern and SAST disclosures. You drill the recurring patterns (promoter sales, PE exits, fund accumulation, well-known investor buys and small-cap pump-and-dump setups), measure what happened next with an event window and abnormal returns against the Nifty, and finish by tracking and interpreting a full month of deals on your own.
- Pull, clean and classify bulk and block deals from NSE and BSE into a working Google Sheets tracker
- Identify who is really on each side of a deal and separate conviction buying from arbitrage and churn
- Size a deal against total equity, free float and average daily volume, and price it against VWAP and the previous close
Understanding Cyclicality in Commodity and Capital Goods Stocks
A practitioner's framework for investing in the most unforgiving corners of the Indian market: steel, aluminium, cement, oil and gas, and the capital goods names that build the country. Learn why these stocks swing far more than the Nifty, how to tell where a cycle is using order books, capacity utilisation, LME prices and margin data, why P/E is a trap for cyclicals and what to use instead, and how to size, time and exit positions. Built around real NSE and BSE case studies including Tata Steel, Hindalco, L&T and BHEL across full boom-to-bust cycles.
Understanding Insider Trading Regulations and Bulk Deal Data
An advanced, India-specific course for experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs who want to use the same disclosure data that institutions watch every evening. It covers the SEBI (Prohibition of Insider Trading) Regulations 2015 in practical terms: what counts as unpublished price sensitive information, who is an insider or connected person, trading window closures, and the disclosure filings that land on NSE and BSE every day. It then moves to bulk deal and block deal data, the 0.5% reporting rule, the block deal window, and how to tell genuine promoter or institutional accumulation from operator-driven distribution. The course closes with SEBI's enforcement machinery, landmark Indian cases, the SAST takeover thresholds that sit alongside insider rules, and the lines a retail investor must never cross when acting on tips, Telegram channels, or a friend inside a listed company.
- Define unpublished price sensitive information, insider, and connected person exactly as SEBI does, and apply the definitions to real situations
- Locate and read insider trading disclosures, pledge data, and trading window closure notices on the NSE and BSE websites
- Explain the 0.5% bulk deal rule, the block deal window, and the difference between the two data sets
Understanding Market Microstructure and Liquidity
An advanced, India-specific course on how orders actually become trades on NSE and BSE, and why liquidity, not just price, decides what you really pay. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNI portfolios who have moved beyond stock picking and now need to understand the order book, price-time priority, pre-open and closing auctions, impact cost, slippage, and the hidden footprint of algos, FIIs and block deals. Covers how to read market depth on Zerodha, measure liquidity with NSE impact cost and delivery data, execute large orders without moving the price, and build a liquidity-aware plan for smallcaps and volatile sessions.
Understanding Promoter Pledging and Its Risks
Promoter pledging is one of the most under-read risk signals in Indian equities. This course explains what happens when a promoter borrows against their own shares, how lenders set loan-to-value limits and margin calls, and why a falling stock price can trigger a spiral of forced selling that ends with the promoter losing control. You will learn to read pledge and encumbrance disclosures on NSE, BSE and screener.in, distinguish healthy pledging from distress, and interpret ratios like pledged shares as a percentage of promoter holding versus total equity. Indian case studies including Zee Entertainment, Coffee Day Enterprises, the Anil Ambani group companies and Yes Bank show how pledge risk played out in real portfolios. The course closes with a practical scorecard, exit triggers and a monitoring routine you can apply to any stock you hold.
- Explain how promoter share pledging works, from loan-to-value ratios to top-ups and invocation
- Read pledge and encumbrance disclosures on NSE, BSE and screener.in and interpret the key ratios
- Separate legitimate pledging from distress signals using trend, lender type and group context
Value Investing
9 courses
Advanced Credit Analysis for Equity Investors
A practical credit analysis framework built for equity investors, not bond investors. Teaches experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs to read debt structure, credit ratings, and leverage the way a credit analyst would, so that deteriorating credit quality is spotted well before it shows up in the stock price. Uses real Indian blowups, including IL&FS, DHFL, Yes Bank, and Reliance Capital, alongside CRISIL and ICRA rating rationales, Screener.in data, and annual report disclosures throughout.
- Analyze a company's debt structure the way credit analysts do
- Use core credit metrics and rating actions to gauge risk
- Build a practical screening framework from real credit case studies
Advanced Valuation: Sum of the Parts and Special Situations
A hands-on course on valuing businesses that a single P/E or DCF cannot handle: conglomerates, holding companies, and companies going through demergers, buybacks, open offers, delistings, and mergers. Teaches experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs to build a sum-of-the-parts valuation segment by segment, apply and defend a holding company discount, and work out the arbitrage math in Indian special situations. Built entirely on real NSE and BSE cases including Reliance Industries, Grasim, Bajaj Holdings, ITC Hotels, Jio Financial Services, and the HDFC merger, using segment reporting under Ind AS 108, SEBI regulations, Screener.in, and exchange filings throughout.
Case Study: Britannia's Margin Expansion Story, A Forensic Read
Between FY2013 and FY2025 Britannia Industries roughly tripled its operating margin while the stock re-rated from a mid-twenties P/E to over fifty times earnings. This advanced case study rebuilds that margin expansion line by line from the annual reports, then runs the forensic checks an experienced investor should run on any margin story: cash conversion, working capital, related-party lending to the Wadia group, bonus debentures, capex and depreciation policy, fiscal incentives and advertising cuts. You will benchmark Britannia against Nestle India, Hindustan Unilever and ITC, stress-test the story through the FY2022 inflation dip and the FY2024 rebound, and leave with a reusable scorecard for separating durable margin gains from borrowed ones.
- How to build a margin bridge from published annual reports and attribute every percentage point of expansion to a named driver
- Which cost lines (raw material, advertising, employee, logistics, wastage) drove Britannia's expansion and how durable each one is
- How to test whether reported EBITDA is backed by operating cash flow, and what negative working capital does to that test
Contrarian Investing: Identifying Value in Out of Favor Sectors
An advanced course on buying what the market has abandoned, without catching falling knives. Learn to separate cyclical troughs from structural decline, apply the capital cycle to Indian sectors, value businesses on normalised earnings and replacement cost, run balance sheet survival tests, identify the catalysts that end a bear phase, and size contrarian positions so that being early does not mean being wrong. Built around real NSE and BSE sector cycles: PSU banks, real estate, telecom, pharma, capital goods and IT.
- Why out-of-favor sectors have historically delivered the best forward returns on the NSE, and why most investors still cannot buy them
- How to diagnose whether a sector is in a cyclical trough, a regulatory overhang or a permanent structural decline
- How to apply the capital cycle framework to Indian sectors like cement, steel, telecom and real estate
Practice Drills: Building a Sum of the Parts Valuation Model
A practice-first companion to Advanced Valuation: Sum of the Parts and Special Situations. Instead of more theory, you build a sum of the parts model in Google Sheets from a blank tab: pull segment data from annual reports and Ind AS 108 notes, value each operating segment with the right metric (EV/EBITDA, P/E, P/B or embedded value), mark listed stakes to NSE prices, apply holding company discounts and tax on stake sales, and bridge the total to a per-share value you can set against the market price. You then run full builds on Larsen & Toubro, Mahindra & Mahindra and Bajaj Finserv, stress-test every segment multiple, back out the stub value the market is paying for the core business, and finish with an SOTP of a company of your choice.
- Lay out a clean, auditable SOTP sheet from a blank Google Sheets tab
- Extract and normalise segment revenue, EBIT and capital employed from annual report segment notes
- Match each segment to the right valuation metric and a defensible peer multiple from screener.in
Practice Drills: Evaluating a Distressed Debt Situation
A practice-first course for investors who already understand how distress and the IBC work and now want to evaluate a real situation themselves. Every lesson is a drill built on the kind of numbers you find in Indian annual reports, exchange filings, rating rationales and NCLT orders. You start by spotting stress early and rebuilding a company's debt schedule from the borrowings note. Then you drill liquidity runway, the maturity wall, coverage ratios and how much debt a business can actually carry. You map claims through the Section 53 waterfall, estimate going-concern and liquidation recovery, price a stressed NCD against its expected recovery and work through security receipt economics. You finish by building a probability-weighted scenario tree, computing creditor haircuts from a resolution plan and running a full evaluation of a stressed issuer from filings to a reasoned decision. Worksheet figures are illustrative; each drill shows you how to rerun it on live data.
- Spot early distress signals in rating actions, default disclosures, promoter pledges and auditor remarks before the headlines
- Rebuild a complete debt schedule from the borrowings note, separating secured, unsecured, short-term and long-term obligations
- Measure liquidity runway and the maturity wall, and judge whether a company can refinance or will default
Understanding Cross Holdings and Group Company Valuation
A hands-on course on how Indian business groups are wired together and what that means for the price you pay for a share. Teaches experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs to trace ownership through subsidiaries, associates, and promoter vehicles, read standalone versus consolidated numbers under Ind AS 110 and Ind AS 28, separate core business value from the value of stakes held, and spot where cross holdings inflate market caps, leak value through related party deals, or hide an unlocking opportunity. Built on real NSE and BSE cases including the Tata group and Tata Sons, Bajaj Holdings and Maharashtra Scooters, Grasim and Aditya Birla Capital, Mahindra and Mahindra, and Reliance Industries, using BSE shareholding filings, annual reports, SEBI regulations, and Screener.in throughout.
- Map any Indian business group from BSE shareholding pattern filings and annual report subsidiary lists
- Read standalone and consolidated statements correctly and know where associate and JV profits appear
- Split a company's value into core business value and the value of stakes it holds, without double counting
Understanding Distressed Debt and Turnaround Investing
A practical guide to investing in companies under financial stress, built for experienced Indian retail investors, active traders, and HNIs. Covers the full distress cycle: how the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code works, why equity usually gets wiped out under the Section 53 waterfall, how to map a capital structure and estimate recovery value, which distressed instruments Indian investors can actually access, and how to separate a genuine turnaround from a value trap. Uses real cases throughout, including Bhushan Steel, Essar Steel, Jet Airways, Ruchi Soya, Suzlon, Vodafone Idea, and Yes Bank, with data from Screener.in, NCLT orders, and exchange filings.
- Read the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code process from default to resolution and know where equity sits in the waterfall
- Map a stressed company's capital structure and estimate liquidation and recovery values
- Understand security receipts, stressed NCDs, and distressed credit AIFs and which ones a retail investor can access
Understanding Special Situations Investing: Spin Offs, Demergers, Buybacks
A strategy course on making money from corporate events rather than from earnings forecasts. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs who want a repeatable process for demergers, spin-offs, buybacks, open offers, delistings, rights issues, and merger arbitrage on NSE and BSE. Covers why these events create mispricing, where to find them before the crowd, how to read the scheme documents and SEBI filings that decide the payoff, how to size positions when capital is locked up, and how the post-October 2024 tax rules change the buyback trade. Anchored in real Indian cases including Jio Financial Services, ITC Hotels, Siemens Energy India, Tata Motors, TCS and Infosys buybacks, the Reliance and Bharti Airtel rights issues, the Vedanta five-way split, and the HDFC merger, using BSE corporate announcements, NCLT filings, SEBI regulations, and Screener.in throughout.
Technical Trading
1 course
Advanced TradingView: Multi Timeframe and Strategy Backtesting
You already know your way around TradingView: charts, indicators, alerts. This course takes you to the part most traders skip. First, multi-timeframe analysis done with discipline: how to pick a timeframe stack that fits NSE's 375-minute session, read trend, setup and trigger from different timeframes, and resolve conflicts between them. Then the Strategy Tester, decoded: which metrics actually matter, how to load realistic Zerodha brokerage, STT, exchange charges, GST, stamp duty and slippage in INR, and why intrabar fill assumptions flatter almost every backtest. Finally, you build and test a multi-timeframe strategy on Nifty 50 stocks, with lookahead bias shut out and the results read honestly. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNI investors who want evidence before conviction.
- Choose a timeframe stack that fits the NSE session and your holding period
- Read trend, setup and trigger top-down, and handle timeframes that disagree
- Build a synced multi-chart TradingView layout with higher-timeframe indicators that do not repaint
Options & Derivatives
3 courses
Advanced Options Strategies for Portfolio Protection
A defined-risk framework for protecting an existing portfolio with options, built for experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs who already know how calls and puts work. Moves past speculation into protective puts, collars, spreads, index-level and tail-risk hedging, and the real cost, margin, and tax mechanics of running a hedge in the Indian market. Uses real Indian drawdowns, including the March 2020 crash and the 2022 correction, alongside Nifty, Bank Nifty, and India VIX data, SPAN margin mechanics, and ITR treatment of options P&L throughout.
- Hedge a portfolio using protective puts, collars and covered calls
- Apply spreads and index-level hedges across diversified portfolios
- Build a systematic framework covering costs, taxes and margin
Practice Drills: Structuring an Options Hedge for a Live Portfolio
A practice-first companion to Advanced Options Strategies for Portfolio Protection. Instead of more theory, you carry a single model portfolio of NSE-listed stocks through every step of building a working hedge: measure its beta against the Nifty 50, turn that into a hedge ratio and a lot count, pick put strikes and expiries, price the hedge as a percentage of portfolio value, and stress-test it against 10%, 20% and 30% falls. Then you finance it with put spreads and collars, deal with single-stock and bank-heavy concentration, check SPAN and exposure margin, account for STT and charges, and manage the hedge live through rolls, rallies and a crash. The course ends with you writing a six-month hedge plan for your own holdings.
- Measure a portfolio's beta to the Nifty 50 and convert it into an exact hedge ratio and lot count
- Choose put strikes and expiries against a stated drawdown you are willing to accept
- Express hedge cost as an annualised percentage of portfolio value and compare structures on that basis
Understanding Futures Contracts and Margin Trading
An advanced, mechanics-first course on futures contracts and leveraged trading for experienced retail investors, active traders, and HNIs who already know what a futures contract is. Covers contract specifications, cost of carry and basis, open interest and rollover, the full NSE Clearing margin stack (SPAN, exposure, mark-to-market, peak margin, shortfall penalties), broker square-off rules, Margin Trading Facility (MTF) and pledging, directional and hedging strategies with Nifty and stock futures, calendar spreads, cash-futures arbitrage, physical settlement, MWPL ban periods, and the taxation of F&O income in India. Built around live NSE contract data, SEBI circulars, and Zerodha-style broker mechanics.
- Read any NSE futures contract specification and compute fair value from the cost of carry
- Explain exactly how SPAN, exposure, and peak margins are computed and why margin calls happen
- Use Margin Trading Facility and pledging correctly, and compute the true cost of leverage
Quantitative Finance
26 courses
Advanced Machine Learning Techniques for Trading: Ensembles and Deep Learning
A rigorous, code-first path into applying ensemble methods and deep learning to systematic trading, for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from correct labeling of market data through random forests, gradient boosting, and stacked ensembles, into recurrent networks and convolutional architectures for sequential price data, with an honest look at where deep learning helps and where it overfits. Built on real NSE and BSE data (Nifty 200, Nifty Bank, sector baskets), with Python throughout.
Advanced Options Strategies: Volatility Arbitrage and Skew Trading
A quant-grade deep dive into volatility trading: how the implied volatility surface is built from the NSE options chain, why skew and term structure exist, and how prop desks and systematic traders extract edge from them through dispersion, risk reversals, calendar spreads, and vanna-volga adjustments.
- How to construct and read the implied volatility surface from live NSE options chain data
- Why volatility skew and smile exist and how to quantify them using risk reversals and butterflies
- How to trade volatility term structure shifts around events like Budget, RBI policy, and earnings
Advanced Regime Switching Models for Strategy Allocation
A rigorous, code-first path into regime detection and regime-switching strategy allocation for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from rule-based regime flags through Hidden Markov Models, Markov-switching regression, regime-conditional strategy design, capital allocation, rigorous backtesting, and risk management through regime transitions. Built on real Nifty, Bank Nifty, and NSE data, with Python throughout.
Advanced Risk Management: Value at Risk and Stress Testing
A rigorous, formula-first treatment of Value at Risk and stress testing built for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and systematic traders who already understand volatility and returns. Covers the three core VaR methodologies (historical simulation, parametric, and Monte Carlo), why VaR breaks down at the tails and how Expected Shortfall fixes it, how to backtest a VaR model properly, and how to build a stress testing framework using real Indian market crises like the 2008 GFC, the 2013 taper tantrum, and the 2020 COVID crash, applied to Nifty, Bank Nifty, and individual NSE stocks.
Advanced Statistical Arbitrage: Multi Factor Approaches
A rigorous, code-first path into statistical arbitrage and multi-factor investing for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from cointegration and pairs trading through basket mean-reversion, factor construction, signal combination, portfolio risk, honest backtesting, execution microstructure, and the SEBI algo-trading and tax framework that governs running this live in India. Built on real NSE and BSE data (Nifty 500 pairs, sector baskets, Kite Connect execution), with Python throughout.
Case Study: Archegos Capital's Collapse Through a Risk Management Lens
In March 2021 a single family office lost roughly USD 20 billion of its own capital in two trading days and handed its prime brokers more than USD 10 billion in losses, without ever owning most of the shares it was betting on. This case study rebuilds Archegos Capital's book, its total return swap financing, and the margin-call cascade that unwound it, then dissects every risk control that should have stopped it and did not. Built for aspiring quant researchers, prop desk applicants and systematic traders scaling up leverage, with each lesson mapped to the Indian framework: SEBI position limits, NSE margining, broker pledging rules and the concentration traps that exist on Indian exchanges too.
- Reconstruct how a USD 10 billion family office built USD 50 billion of hidden exposure using total return swaps across eight prime brokers
- Trace the March 2021 margin-call cascade day by day and explain why the fastest bank to sell lost nothing while the slowest lost USD 5.5 billion
- Diagnose the specific risk-control failures at Credit Suisse: static margining, ignored limit breaches, potential exposure blind spots and governance gaps
Case Study: Building and Scaling a Volatility Arbitrage Desk
A case study that follows a two-person Mumbai prop desk from a first delta-hedged Nifty straddle to a fifty crore volatility book. You build the pricing and Greeks toolkit, run the core short gamma book and the relative value overlays (skew, term structure, dispersion), design the risk limits and margin discipline that keep a short volatility desk alive on gap days, move from Excel to a production stack on broker APIs, and work through SEBI's F&O and algo framework, taxation, and entity structure. Every chapter closes with a case drawn from real NSE events, and every number is worked in INR on Nifty and Bank Nifty options.
- Measure the volatility risk premium on Nifty and Bank Nifty using India VIX and realized volatility estimators
- Price and risk manage an options book with a Black-76 engine and a full Greeks ladder (delta, gamma, vega, theta, vanna, volga)
- Run a delta-hedged short gamma book and attribute its P&L to theta, gamma, vega and hedging costs
Case Study: How Alternative Data Predicted Retail Earnings Surprises
An advanced case study built around Meridian Quant, a fictional Mumbai systematic fund, and its analyst Priya Nair, who is asked one question: can data that arrives before a quarter ends tell us whether DMart, Trent, Titan or V-Mart will beat or miss consensus? Each chapter is one stage of the project: mapping the retail P&L to what alternative data can actually observe, assembling an Indian data stack from GST and UPI aggregates, Google Trends, app-download panels, scraped store locators and price trackers, engineering point-in-time features, building and backtesting a revenue nowcast against Bloomberg and Refinitiv consensus, walking through three real earnings quarters where the model called a beat, called a miss, and got it wrong, and finally turning the forecast into a sized, risk-controlled event trade that survives crowding, signal decay and SEBI's insider-trading line. Built for aspiring quant researchers, prop-desk applicants and systematic traders who want to see a complete alternative-data pipeline in an Indian context, with the failures left in.
- Map an Indian retailer's P&L to the alternative datasets that can observe each line item before results are announced
- Source and clean Indian alternative data: GST and e-way bill aggregates, UPI volumes, Google Trends, app-download panels, scraped store counts and price trackers
- Engineer point-in-time features aligned to Indian fiscal quarters without look-ahead bias
Case Study: How Jane Street Approaches Market Making
Jane Street quotes prices in thousands of ETFs, bonds and options across the world, and in July 2025 it became the most talked-about trading firm in India when SEBI's interim order accused it of manipulating Bank Nifty. This case study takes the firm apart as a market maker: how a quote is priced, skewed for inventory and protected from toxic flow, how ETF creation and redemption keep prices honest, and how options market making works on NSE's index options, the busiest derivatives market in the world. It then reads the SEBI order carefully, separating what is alleged from what is proven while the matter is before SAT, and closes with a Python market making simulator, risk limits, and what prop shop interviews actually test. Built for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants and systematic traders scaling up.
- Explain how a market maker earns the spread and why adverse selection, not competition, is its biggest cost
- Price a fair value, skew quotes for inventory, and recognise toxic order flow using Indian equity and index examples
- Walk through ETF creation and redemption and why Indian ETFs often trade away from their iNAV
Case Study: Renaissance Technologies' Medallion Fund, What's Publicly Known
An advanced case study that separates the documented record of Renaissance Technologies' Medallion Fund from the folklore. We grade the sources, take the return series apart, reconstruct the engine from public testimony, interviews and the US Senate's basket options report, and then test which ideas survive contact with NSE data, Indian costs and SEBI's rules. Built for quant research aspirants, prop desk applicants and systematic traders scaling up.
- How to grade the public sources on Renaissance and tell documented fact from repeated rumour
- How to read Medallion's gross and net returns, fee structure and the statistics of a single outlier
- What public testimony and interviews reveal about the signals, the single integrated model, leverage and execution
Case Study: The 2010 Flash Crash, A Market Microstructure Post Mortem
On the afternoon of 6 May 2010 the US equity market lost close to a trillion dollars of value and got most of it back within about half an hour. This course runs the event as a full post-mortem. Start with the market structure that made it possible: fragmented venues, Reg NMS, the E-mini future and liquidity providers with no obligation to stay. Then replay the crash: a large sell algorithm keyed only to volume, high-frequency traders passing contracts back and forth, a five-second pause in Chicago and trades in blue chips at a penny. Weigh the competing explanations, from the CFTC-SEC report to order flow toxicity to the spoofing charges brought five years later, and rebuild the liquidity collapse yourself. Finish with the regulatory fixes, India's own freak trade of October 2012, the safeguards NSE and SEBI run today and a playbook for building execution logic that cannot become the next 6 May.
- Explain how venue fragmentation, Reg NMS and unobligated liquidity providers set the stage for 6 May 2010
- Replay the crash minute by minute across the E-mini future, ETFs and individual stocks
- Show why a sell algorithm targeting a percentage of volume, with no price or time limit, fed on its own impact
Practice Drills: Building a Multi Factor Alpha Model From Raw Data
A practice-first course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants and systematic traders scaling a book. You will build a point-in-time NSE dataset free of survivorship and look-ahead bias, engineer value, momentum, quality and low-volatility signals, test each one with information coefficients, quintile spreads and Fama-MacBeth regressions, combine them into a neutralised alpha score, and run an honest walk-forward backtest with Indian costs and SEBI constraints. Every drill is done in Python on data you assemble yourself.
- How to build a point-in-time NSE universe and returns panel without survivorship or look-ahead bias
- How to engineer, winsorise, z-score and sector-neutralise raw factor signals
- How to judge a factor with IC, IC decay, quintile spreads and Fama-MacBeth regressions
Practice Drills: Building a Risk Parity Allocation From Scratch
A hands-on drill course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. You will build a risk parity allocation across Nifty 50, Nifty Midcap 150, 10-year G-Secs, and gold, starting from raw return series and a covariance matrix, working inverse-volatility weights by hand, solving true equal risk contribution in Google Sheets and then in Python, and finally making the portfolio investable with volatility targeting and a rebalancing policy that respects Indian costs and capital gains tax.
- How to turn raw NSE index and ETF prices into clean return series and an annualised covariance matrix
- How to compute inverse-volatility weights by hand and why they are only an approximation of risk parity
- How to calculate each asset's marginal and total risk contribution and check whether a portfolio is truly risk-balanced
Practice Drills: Building a Volatility Skew Trading Signal
A hands-on drill course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and systematic traders scaling up. You will take a raw Nifty option chain from NSE, solve implied volatility strike by strike, interpolate to fixed deltas, build a constant-maturity skew series, normalise it into a z-score, and turn that into explicit entry and exit rules. Then you will backtest the signal with Indian transaction costs and lot sizes, hunt down look-ahead bias, and finish with a go or no-go scorecard. Every step is worked by hand first, then coded in Python.
- How to pull and clean an NSE Nifty option chain so illiquid strikes and stale quotes do not corrupt your skew measure
- How to solve implied volatility strike by strike in Python and interpolate it to fixed 25-delta and ATM points
- How to build a constant-maturity 30-day skew series by blending two expiries
Practice Drills: Coding a Deep Learning Model for Price Prediction
A hands-on drill course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. You code a next-day return forecaster for the Nifty 50 in Python and PyTorch from a blank notebook: framing the target correctly, windowing sequences without leaking the future, building a dense baseline and an LSTM, writing the training loop with early stopping, and then attacking your own results with naive baselines, walk-forward retraining, seed variance tests, and real Indian trading costs. The capstone runs the full pipeline end to end on Bank Nifty.
- Frame price prediction as a return forecasting problem and set a naive baseline the network must beat
- Scale features and slice sliding windows without leaking test data into training
- Build a dense network and an LSTM in PyTorch and write a training loop with early stopping
Practice Drills: Mock Quant Researcher Technical Interview Round
A mock technical round for anyone applying to quant researcher roles at prop desks, hedge funds and systematic trading firms in India. Each lesson is a drill set modelled on the questions these rounds actually ask: probability puzzles, statistics and econometrics, linear algebra and stochastic calculus, live Python coding, and open-ended research cases built on NSE data. You solve under time pressure, then compare your reasoning against a model answer and a scoring rubric. The course ends with a full timed mock round and a structured debrief.
- Understand how a quant researcher technical round is structured and scored
- Solve conditional probability, expected value and random walk problems quickly and out loud
- Answer regression, hypothesis testing and time series questions with the depth interviewers probe for
Practice Drills: Stress Testing a Portfolio Against Historical Crisis Scenarios
A drill-heavy course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants and systematic traders scaling up capital who understand VaR and volatility but have never actually put a portfolio through a crisis. You work on one sample ₹50 lakh Indian portfolio across Nifty stocks, a small-cap sleeve, gilt and credit debt funds, gold and a US equity fund. You map its factor exposures, replay four real Indian market crises by hand, measure drawdown and recovery, watch correlations break, attribute the losses, design hypothetical and reverse stress tests, check whether you could even exit the small caps, and finish by building a replay engine in Python and writing the stress test report a risk committee would expect.
- Decompose a multi-asset Indian portfolio into equity beta, rate, currency and credit exposures
- Pick crisis windows honestly, with defensible peak, trough and recovery dates
- Replay the 2008 GFC, 2013 taper tantrum, 2018 IL&FS crisis and 2020 COVID crash on a real portfolio
Practice Drills: Structuring a Value at Risk Calculation for a Multi Asset Book
A hands-on drill course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants and systematic traders scaling beyond one strategy. Knowing the VaR formula is easy; structuring a VaR calculation for a real book that holds Nifty stocks, Government securities, USD/INR futures, gold and Nifty options is where most candidates fall apart in interviews and most desks get the number quietly wrong. You work on one realistic INR book throughout and structure its VaR drill by drill. You fix the question (horizon, confidence, base currency), inventory the positions, and map each one to risk factors: equity beta, G-Sec key rate vertices through cash-flow mapping, currency and commodity exposures, and option delta and gamma. Then you compute parametric, historical simulation and Monte Carlo VaR on the same book, explain why the three numbers differ, decompose risk into component, marginal and incremental VaR, extend to expected shortfall and multi-day horizons, overlay stress scenarios from real Indian market episodes, backtest with the Kupiec test and a traffic light, and write the methodology note a risk committee will actually sign. Every drill uses NSE, RBI and MCX instruments and INR figures.
- Frame a VaR calculation precisely: horizon, confidence level, base currency and what the number is for
- Inventory a multi-asset INR book and map every position to a small, explicit set of risk factors
- Map G-Sec holdings to key rate vertices and translate currency, gold and equity exposures into INR factor sensitivities
Understanding Alternative Data in Quantitative Strategies
A rigorous, theory-and-practice path into alternative data for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Covers the taxonomy of alt data (web, satellite, transaction, text, supply chain), sourcing and compliance in the Indian context, feature engineering, signal research, rigorous backtesting, portfolio integration, and real Indian case studies from satellite tracking to UPI data. Built around NSE, BSE, and Indian vendor examples throughout.
Understanding Capacity Constraints and Strategy Scaling
A framework-driven look at why every trading strategy has a ceiling on how much capital it can absorb, and how quant researchers, prop desks, and systematic traders scale AUM without destroying their own edge. Covers market impact, liquidity, alpha decay, crowding, capacity estimation, scaling playbooks, and execution at scale, grounded throughout in NSE liquidity, Nifty and Bank Nifty examples, and real capacity math.
Understanding Latency, Colocation, and Infrastructure in HFT
A ground-up look at the infrastructure layer of high frequency trading: what latency actually costs, why firms pay for colocation at NSE and BSE, how SEBI regulates fair access, and the network and hardware choices that separate microseconds from milliseconds.
- How tick-to-trade latency is measured and where the time actually goes
- Why colocation at NSE and BSE exists and how SEBI regulates fair access to it
- How fiber, microwave, and FPGA hardware choices trade off cost against speed
Understanding Market Making and Liquidity Provision Strategies
A rigorous, India-grounded path into how market makers actually operate: the economics of the bid-ask spread, inventory risk, adverse selection, order book microstructure, and the regulatory framework SEBI and NSE/BSE impose on liquidity providers. Built for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book, using real Nifty, Bank Nifty, and NSE order book examples throughout.
Understanding Multi Asset Systematic Strategies
A rigorous path into building systematic strategies that span equities, fixed income, commodities, and currencies, for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from the asset universe and cross-asset correlation through trend-following, carry, value, risk parity, multi-strategy allocation, rigorous backtesting, and the operational realities of running a multi-asset book. Built on real NSE, MCX, and G-Sec data throughout.
Understanding Order Book Dynamics and Microstructure Alpha
A rigorous, code-first path into limit order book mechanics and microstructure alpha for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from order book anatomy and price formation through trade classification, price impact, and short-horizon alpha signals like order book imbalance and VPIN, all built on real NSE and BSE tick and depth data, with Python throughout.
Understanding Reinforcement Learning Applications in Trading
A rigorous, code-first path into reinforcement learning for trading, for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from framing trading as a Markov Decision Process through core RL theory, building a working trading environment in Python, and (in later chapters) training, validating, and stress-testing RL-based strategies on real NSE data.
Understanding Risk Parity and Advanced Portfolio Construction
A rigorous, formula-first path into risk parity and modern portfolio construction for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. Goes from the failures of mean-variance optimization through equal risk contribution, volatility targeting and leverage, correlation regimes, Hierarchical Risk Parity, factor risk parity, and honest backtesting, ending with a live Python build using Nifty, G-Sec, and gold data. Built entirely on Indian asset classes.
Algorithmic Trading
3 courses
Case Study: How HFT Firms Compete on Latency in Indian Markets
A case study of the speed race that now sets prices on Indian exchanges. Start with why a few microseconds are worth crores to a market maker and how high-frequency trading arrived in India after direct market access and NSE colocation. Trace a single order through the tick-to-trade path: colocation racks, tick-by-tick feeds, kernel bypass, FPGAs and clock sync. Study the NSE colocation case in depth, where feed design handed some brokers a first-to-connect edge, and what SEBI's orders changed. Then see the strategies that live on speed, from Nifty and Bank Nifty options market making to NSE versus BSE and GIFT Nifty arbitrage, the rules that shape the race, and the point where spending on speed stops paying. Finish by running the numbers on a latency upgrade for an illustrative Mumbai prop desk.
- Explain why being first by microseconds changes who earns the spread and who gets picked off
- Trace the full tick-to-trade path on NSE and put a latency budget on every hop
- Separate the hardware edges that matter (colocation, feeds, kernel bypass, FPGAs) from the ones that are marketing
Case Study: Knight Capital's Algorithmic Trading Disaster
On the morning of 1 August 2012 Knight Capital, the largest US market maker in equities, switched on new code for the NYSE Retail Liquidity Program. One of its eight servers never got the update. Old, unused logic woke up, and in about 45 minutes Knight's router sent millions of orders into the market and built a position worth billions of dollars it never meant to hold. The loss came to roughly 460 million dollars and the firm needed a rescue within days. This course runs the event as a full post-mortem: Knight's business and its order router, the deployment gap and the warnings that went unread, a minute-by-minute replay of how the losses compounded, the rescue and the SEC's Market Access Rule case, and India's own algo failures and safeguards from the Emkay freak trade of 2012 to SEBI's retail algo framework. It ends with an engineering playbook: pre-trade checks, deployment discipline and kill switches you can apply to your own strategies.
- Explain how Knight Capital made money as a wholesale market maker and why the NYSE Retail Liquidity Program mattered to it
- Trace how dead code, a repurposed flag and a manual deployment to eight servers combined into a live failure
- Replay the 45 minutes of 1 August 2012 and show how buying high and selling low at machine speed compounded the loss
Practice Drills: Simulating a Market Making Strategy on Order Book Data
A hands-on drill course for quant researcher aspirants, prop trading applicants, and traders scaling a systematic book. You will rebuild an NSE limit order book from tick-by-tick messages, code a naive two-sided quoter, simulate fills with honest queue-position assumptions, decompose the P&L into spread capture, inventory and costs, measure adverse selection with markouts, then upgrade the quoter with inventory skew and an Avellaneda-Stoikov model. The course ends with pessimistic-fill and toxic-day stress tests and a go/no-go scorecard. Every step is worked by hand first, then coded.
- How to rebuild a level-2 order book from tick-by-tick add, modify, cancel and trade messages
- How to anchor quotes on the mid-price or microprice and round them correctly to NSE tick sizes
- How to model fills with queue position and partial fills instead of the optimistic touch-equals-fill assumption
Corporate Finance
16 courses
Advanced Investor Relations: Managing Institutional Shareholder Expectations
Once a company is listed, its share price is set at the margin by a few dozen institutions: FPIs, domestic mutual funds, insurers and pension money. This advanced course is for CFOs, finance leaders, late-stage founders and corporate development teams who have to manage what those institutions expect. It covers who owns India Inc and why, how to read and shape a shareholder register, how consensus forms and how to guide without breaching SEBI LODR, how stewardship codes and proxy advisors drive votes on related party transactions and special resolutions, how to handle activists and short sellers, and how to run and measure a serious institutional IR programme. Educational content only, built on real Indian cases.
- How promoter, FPI, DII and retail ownership of Indian companies has shifted and what each holder type wants
- How to read a shareholder register and target the investors who fit your stock
- How free float, block deals, OFS and QIPs reshape your institutional base
Advanced Treasury Strategy: Liquidity Management Across Multiple Entities
Built for CFOs, group treasurers, finance controllers, late-stage founders and corp dev teams who run more than one legal entity. A group with ten companies and forty bank accounts can be cash rich on a consolidated basis and still miss a payroll in one subsidiary. This course shows how to get group-wide cash visibility, forecast liquidity entity by entity, and move money inside the group using the tools Indian law actually allows: inter-corporate loans under Sections 185 and 186 of the Companies Act, related party approvals, arm's length pricing, physical sweeps and in-house banking. It covers the tax traps (deemed dividend, TDS on interest, Section 94B thin capitalisation, GST on corporate guarantees), cross-border liquidity through FEMA and GIFT City treasury centres, a group investment policy for surplus cash, holdco versus opco borrowing, and liquidity stress testing, closing with lessons from IL&FS and DHFL and a full treasury blueprint for a five-entity Indian group.
- How to map a group's cash, find trapped liquidity and choose between centralised, decentralised and hybrid treasury models
- How to build a group-wide 13-week rolling cash forecast and measure its accuracy
- How to move cash between group entities legally using Sections 185, 186 and 188 and arm's length pricing
Practice Drills: Building a Board Level Capital Allocation Presentation
A hands-on drill course for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams, and late-stage founders who have to take a capital allocation plan to a board and get it approved. Working with one sample NSE-listed manufacturer, you will size the five-year deployable cash envelope, estimate the hurdle rate, stress-test the plan against covenants and a downturn, then rank the competing uses on a common basis: capex projects, an acquisition, dividends, a buyback, and debt reduction. You will then turn the numbers into a board deck with a single clear recommendation, the approvals it needs under the Companies Act and SEBI rules, and a risk section that tells directors what would change the answer. The course closes with an independent-director Q&A drill and a complete board pack.
- How to size a five-year deployable cash envelope from free cash flow, balance sheet cash, and debt capacity
- How to estimate a defensible hurdle rate for an Indian listed company and adjust it for project risk
- How to stress-test an allocation plan against lender covenants and a downturn scenario
Practice Drills: Building an IPO Readiness Gap Analysis
A hands-on drill course for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams, and founders of late-stage companies weighing an NSE or BSE mainboard listing. You will work through a single illustrative Indian private company and build its IPO readiness gap analysis from scratch: testing it against SEBI ICDR eligibility, stress-testing its financials, board, cap table, controls, and disclosure practices against what a DRHP and SEBI LODR will demand, then scoring, costing, and sequencing every gap into a listing roadmap you can present to a board.
- How to structure an IPO readiness gap analysis workbook with workstreams, RAG ratings, owners, and evidence
- How to test a company against SEBI ICDR mainboard eligibility and choose between the profitability and QIB routes
- How to find the financial reporting gaps a DRHP will expose, from restated Ind AS financials to audited KPIs
Practice Drills: Modeling a Multi Entity Liquidity Stress Scenario
A hands-on drill course for CFOs, finance controllers, group treasurers, late-stage founders and corp dev teams who answer for liquidity across more than one legal entity. You take one illustrative five-entity Indian group (a listed holdco, a manufacturing opco funded by working capital lines and commercial paper, a lender ring-fenced infrastructure SPV, a distribution subsidiary and a GIFT City entity with a USD loan) and build its liquidity stress model in a spreadsheet. You forecast 13 weeks of cash entity by entity, define what really counts as available liquidity, eliminate intercompany flows, then design a combined shock drawn from IL&FS 2018 and COVID 2020: a key buyer default, a CP rollover failure and rating downgrade, and a rupee and market shock. You run it through every entity, find the first breach week, test covenants and cross-default contagion, separate cash that can move from cash that is trapped under Sections 185 and 186, FEMA and lender ring-fences, rank the response levers, size the buffer with a reverse stress test, and finish with a one-page board report and a quarterly contingency funding plan.
- How to lay out a multi-entity liquidity stress model with entity sheets, an intercompany elimination layer and a consolidated view
- How to build a 13-week base-case cash forecast for each entity and define available liquidity with sensible haircuts
- How to design a plausible combined stress scenario from real Indian episodes like IL&FS 2018 and COVID 2020
Practice Drills: Preparing an ESG Disclosure Summary for Board Review
A hands-on drill course for CFOs, financial controllers, senior finance leaders, pre-IPO founders and corporate development teams who own the ESG number that goes to the board. You will work through one illustrative Indian listed manufacturer's sustainability data from raw plant-level inputs to a finished board summary: scoping under SEBI's BRSR and BRSR Core, building a materiality matrix, normalising energy, water, waste and GHG numbers, reconciling ESG figures to the audited financial statements, reading workforce and governance metrics, and handling value chain data gaps. The course ends with you assembling a full board ESG pack and rehearsing the questions independent directors and the audit committee will ask before they sign off.
- What a board and audit committee actually need from an ESG disclosure summary, and what they do not
- How SEBI's BRSR, BRSR Core, value chain disclosures and the reasonable assurance glide path shape what finance must sign off
- How to build a materiality matrix and map each material issue to the right BRSR principle and KPI
Practice Drills: Responding to a Simulated Activist Investor Letter
A hands-on drill course for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams, and late-stage founders who may one day open a letter from an activist shareholder. You work through one simulated case end to end: a sample NSE-listed company with a large cash pile, a low-return subsidiary, and a history of related party contracts receives a public letter from a fund holding just over 5 percent. You will read the letter the way a board should, rebuild the activist's valuation math, map the shareholder register to see who actually decides the vote, handle the first 72 hours of disclosure and insider trading controls, and stress-test each demand on its merits. You will then choose a stance, draft the board's reply and investor presentation, prepare for an EGM requisition under the Companies Act, and negotiate a settlement. The course closes with a complete activist response pack.
- How to read an activist letter and separate its demands, its evidence, and its implied threats
- How to rebuild and test an activist's sum of the parts and value gap calculations
- How the SEBI Takeover Code, LODR, and Companies Act sections on requisitions and director removal shape an Indian activist campaign
Practice Drills: Structuring a Convertible Debt Term Sheet
A practice-first course for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams and pre-IPO founders who have to structure convertible debt from the issuer's side of the table. Working from a sample late-growth Indian company raising INR 300 crore from a private equity investor, you will choose between compulsorily convertible debentures, optionally convertible debentures, FCCBs and NCDs with warrants, check the route under the Companies Act, FEMA and SEBI rules, then build the term sheet clause by clause: issue size, coupon, conversion price and premium, IPO-linked floors and ratchets, maturity, redemption premium and investor yield, anti-dilution, security, covenants, puts, calls and governance rights. Every economic term is tested in rupees against conversion and exit scenarios, including the dilution and EPS hit, the Ind AS 32 liability and equity split, and withholding tax and stamp duty. The course closes with three full end-to-end drills and a before-you-sign scorecard. Educational content only, not legal, tax or investment advice.
- Choose between CCDs, OCDs, FCCBs and NCDs with warrants for a specific issuer and defend the choice to a board
- Check the Companies Act, FEMA, ECB and SEBI route for a convertible issue before drafting a word
- Set the coupon, conversion price, conversion premium and IPO-linked floors and ratchets, and prove in rupees what each costs the promoters
Understanding Advanced Capital Allocation Strategy for CFOs
Over ten years, the way a company allocates its capital decides its share price more than any single quarter's results. This advanced concept course is for CFOs, finance controllers, senior corporate finance leaders, corporate development teams and late-stage founders who own that decision inside one company. It starts with the economics of value creation (ROIC against WACC, and incremental returns on new capital), then shows how to set risk-adjusted hurdle rates and size a realistic capital envelope from free cash flow and debt capacity. It covers organic investment under uncertainty, including the biases that distort capital budgeting and the real options that justify staged bets, then acquisitions and exits through Indian deals such as Tata Steel and Corus, Hindalco and Novelis, and recent demergers. It closes with dividends, buybacks and cash policy under current Indian tax rules, leverage as an allocation choice, incentive design, investor communication, and a capital allocation scorecard you can apply to your own company. Educational content only, not investment advice.
- How to measure value creation with ROIC, WACC, economic profit and incremental return on invested capital
- How to set divisional and project hurdle rates for an Indian company without double counting risk
- How to size a multi-year capital envelope from free cash flow, balance sheet cash and debt capacity at a target rating
Understanding Complex Debt Instruments: Convertibles, Mezzanine, and Structured Debt
An India-focused, advanced course on the financing instruments that sit between plain vanilla debt and common equity, built for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams and late-stage founders. Map where hybrids sit in the capital stack and learn the Indian toolkit: NCDs, CCDs, OCDs, CCPS, FCCBs and warrants. Take a convertible apart into conversion price, ratio, premium and parity, value it as a bond plus a call option, and see how Ind AS 32 split accounting and diluted EPS change the reported numbers. Study the FCCB boom and bust through the Suzlon experience, and how CCDs and CCPS are used in pre-IPO and strategic deals. Price mezzanine finance through cash coupons, PIK interest and equity kickers, understand promoter and holdco funding from Indian AIFs and NBFCs, and see what subordination and intercreditor terms mean for recovery under the IBC. Work through securitisation with PTCs and direct assignment, market-linked debentures after the 2023 tax change, covenants, escrows and cash waterfalls, and SO and CE rated obligations. Finish with a framework for matching the instrument to the situation, the term sheet clauses that quietly move value, and two case studies: an illustrative comparison of three ways to fund a ₹500 crore acquisition, and the role of convertibles in Tata Steel's acquisition of Corus.
Understanding Corporate Credit Ratings From an Issuer's Perspective
Built for CFOs, finance controllers, senior corporate finance leaders, pre-IPO founders and corp dev teams who sit on the other side of the rating table. Most material on credit ratings is written for investors reading a rating. This course is written for the company being rated. It covers how CRISIL, ICRA, CARE and India Ratings assess business and financial risk, what goes into the information pack and the management meeting, how to read and respond to a rating committee outcome, and how to manage surveillance, outlook changes and non-cooperation flags. It then turns the rating into a planning tool: building a shadow rating model, testing capex, acquisitions and dividends against agency thresholds, handling rating triggers in loan and bond documents, and translating rating notches into spreads on bonds, bank loans and commercial paper. It closes with downgrades, the strict Indian default definitions, and lessons from IL&FS.
- How Indian rating agencies are regulated by SEBI and what each symbol, outlook and watch actually signals
- How agencies score business risk, financial risk, management quality and group support, and where notching comes from
- How to choose an agency, prepare the information pack and run the management meeting with the rating committee
Understanding Cross Border Tax Structuring for Multinational Operations
Every rupee a multinational earns crosses at least two tax systems on its way to shareholders, and the structure of the group decides how much of it arrives. This course is for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development and M&A teams, and founders preparing for scale or listing. It covers residence, source and permanent establishment, how DTAAs actually work, outbound structuring under India's FEMA overseas investment rules, inbound entry vehicles and funding, royalties and service fees, indirect transfers, transfer pricing for operating models, intangibles and financing, GAAR and the principal purpose test, the Tiger Global ruling, Pillar Two and digital taxes, startup flips and reverse flips, and how to govern tax risk at board level. Built on real Indian cases and companies. Educational content only, not tax, legal or investment advice.
- How residence, source and permanent establishment rules decide which country taxes which profit, and how DTAAs relieve double taxation
- How Indian groups set up overseas subsidiaries under FEMA rules, choose a holding jurisdiction and bring profits home efficiently
- How foreign groups choose an Indian entry vehicle, fund it with debt or equity and charge royalties and service fees without inviting disputes
Understanding ESG Reporting Requirements for Large Corporates
For India's top 1,000 listed companies, ESG reporting is no longer a glossy annual brochure. It is a SEBI-mandated filing, increasingly subject to external assurance, read by lenders, rating agencies, global customers and foreign investors. This advanced concept course is for CFOs, finance controllers, senior corporate finance leaders, corporate development teams and pre-IPO founders who own that filing. It walks through the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) section by section, then BRSR Core, the assurance glide path and value chain disclosures. It covers the hard numbers (Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, energy, water, waste and workforce metrics), maps BRSR to ISSB, GRI, TCFD, CDP and the EU's CSRD and CBAM, and shows how to build ESG data controls, board oversight and greenwashing safeguards. It closes with ESG disclosure in IPOs and M&A diligence, peer benchmarking using real Indian BRSRs, and a 12 month implementation roadmap. Educational content only, not investment advice.
- Which Indian companies must file a BRSR, when, and what SEBI's applicability rules actually say
- How to read and prepare every section of the BRSR, including essential and leadership indicators across the nine NGRBC principles
- What BRSR Core requires, how assessment and assurance differ, and how the phased glide path applies to your company
Understanding Pre IPO Readiness: Financial and Governance Requirements
A concept course for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams and founders of late-stage Indian companies who need to know what IPO readiness actually requires before the bankers arrive. It covers the financial, controls, governance and capital structure requirements, from SEBI ICDR eligibility and restated Ind AS financials to SEBI LODR board composition, related party transactions, promoter contribution and cap table clean up. Each lesson explains why the requirement exists and where Indian companies typically fall short, so you can judge how far your company is from a fileable DRHP.
- What IPO readiness means as an operating state, and why it takes 18 to 24 months to reach
- How SEBI ICDR mainboard eligibility works under the profitability test and the QIB route, and when the SME platform fits better
- What restated financials, Ind AS policies, audit quality and KPI disclosures a DRHP will demand
Understanding Related Party Transaction Governance at Scale
In a promoter-led Indian business group, related party transactions are not an occasional exception. They run through every month's books: shared brands, intra-group loans, common suppliers, cross-guarantees, management fees and asset transfers between dozens of entities. Most governance failures that have destroyed shareholder value in India, from Fortis to Coffee Day, ran through exactly these channels. This advanced concept course is for CFOs, finance controllers, senior corporate finance leaders, corporate development teams and pre-IPO founders who have to make related party governance work across a large group, not just on paper. It covers who counts as a related party under the Companies Act, SEBI LODR and Ind AS 24, how approval thresholds and materiality actually work, what the audit committee must see and test, how to benchmark arm's length pricing, and how to build a group policy, ERP controls and continuous monitoring that hold up at thousands of transactions a year. It closes with disclosure, shareholder votes, auditor scrutiny and the special situations (royalties, intra-group funding, IPOs and restructurings) where related party risk is highest. Educational content only, not investment or legal advice.
- Why related party transactions are the main channel through which value leaks from listed Indian companies, and how to recognise each leakage pattern
- How the Companies Act, SEBI LODR and Ind AS 24 each define a related party, and how to map the full related party universe of a large group
- How board, audit committee and shareholder approval thresholds work, including materiality, omnibus approvals and material modifications
Understanding Shareholder Activism and How Companies Respond
A concept course for CFOs, finance controllers, corporate development teams, and late-stage founders who want to understand shareholder activism before they ever face it. In India, promoters often hold large stakes, so activism rarely looks like a Wall Street proxy fight. It works through institutional votes, proxy advisor recommendations, EGM requisitions, majority of minority approvals on related party transactions, and public pressure. You will learn what activists want and how they pick targets, the Companies Act, SEBI LODR, and Takeover Code provisions that set the rules of engagement, how proxy advisors and mutual fund stewardship codes shape voting, and how boards should prepare, respond, and decide whether to engage, settle, or resist. The course closes with Indian cases where shareholders changed the outcome, and a readiness plan you can apply to your own company.
- What shareholder activists want and how activism in promoter-controlled Indian companies differs from activism in widely held markets
- Which voting thresholds, EGM requisition rights, and director removal powers shareholders have under the Companies Act, 2013
- How SEBI's Takeover Code, LODR, and insider trading rules shape the way a stake is built and a campaign is run
M&A & Valuation
3 courses
Advanced M&A Integration Strategy Post Deal Close
A strategy-level course on post-merger integration for CFOs and finance controllers, senior corporate finance leaders, corp dev and M&A teams, and late-stage founders preparing to buy or be bought. Go beyond the first 100 days: choose the right integration model for the deal, write an integration thesis, design the combined operating model, organisation and decision rights, and run a synergy ledger that tracks value for three years, not three months. Work through the Indian layer that only shows up after close: post-acquisition mergers under Sections 230 to 233 of the Companies Act, Section 72A loss carry-forward, stamp duty and GST continuity, purchase price allocation and goodwill impairment under Ind AS 103 and Ind AS 36, and the SEBI rules that bind a listed target. Then study real Indian integrations, LTI and Mindtree, Air India and Vistara, and Zomato and Blinkit, and leave with a reusable integration playbook.
- Pick between absorption, preservation, symbiosis and holding models based on what the deal thesis actually needs
- Turn a deal model into an integration thesis and a value creation plan with named owners
- Design the combined operating model, leadership structure and decision rights, including for a listed or partly owned target
Practice Drills: Structuring an M&A Integration Plan for the First 100 Days
A hands-on drill course for CFOs, corp dev and M&A teams, senior corporate finance leaders, and late-stage founders. You will work one illustrative Indian deal, a listed acquirer buying a promoter-run private company, through its first 100 days: turning the deal thesis into an integration charter, standing up the Integration Management Office, clearing Day 1 legal, regulatory, and SEBI disclosure requirements, retaining key people, protecting customers and working capital, building and phasing a synergy tracking model, budgeting one-time integration costs, and presenting a Day 100 review to the board.
- How to convert an acquisition's deal thesis into a one-page integration charter with measurable value drivers
- How to design an Integration Management Office, workstreams, and a governance cadence that a board can hold to account
- How to build a Day 1 checklist covering CCI, SEBI LODR disclosures, MCA filings, GST, banking, and payroll continuity
Understanding Spin Offs, Demergers, and Corporate Restructuring at Scale
An advanced, India-specific guide to separating a large business from the inside, built for CFOs and finance controllers, senior corporate finance leaders, late-stage founders and corporate development teams. Start with the strategic case: when a split creates value, how to choose between a demerger, spin-off, carve-out IPO, slump sale or trade sale, and how to measure stranded costs and dis-synergies before the board commits. Then design the transaction: the perimeter, the split of debt, cash and net worth, the entitlement ratio, and the appointed, effective and record dates. Work through the tax conditions for a tax-neutral demerger under Section 2(19AA), the slump sale alternative, and the Ind AS accounting. Follow the full regulatory road map from board approval and the stock exchange observation letter to the NCLT order and the listing of the resulting company. Finish with execution at scale: the separation office, transition service agreements, people, systems, ratings and the investor story, anchored in real NSE and BSE cases including Reliance and Jio Financial Services, ITC and ITC Hotels, the Tata Motors split and Vedanta's multi-way demerger.
Macro & Markets
13 courses
Advanced Analysis of Sovereign Debt Sustainability
A rigorous framework for assessing whether a sovereign's debt load is sustainable, built for macro-focused investors, fund managers, and senior finance professionals who need to move past headline debt-to-GDP numbers. Covers the debt dynamics equation, the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework, market-based risk signals like bond spreads and CDS, and the mechanics of default and restructuring. Anchored throughout in India's own fiscal position (FRBM, Finance Commission, G-Sec yields, RBI) alongside real emerging-market case studies including Sri Lanka, Zambia, and Ghana.
Advanced Frameworks for Predicting Recession and Recovery Phases
A framework-driven course on identifying where the economy sits in the business cycle and what that means for markets, built for macro-focused investors, fund managers running top-down allocation calls, and senior finance professionals. Goes from the mechanics of leading, lagging, and coincident indicators through yield curve and credit signals, real-economy recession data, recovery-phase identification, and cycle-based portfolio positioning, grounded throughout in Indian data (RBI policy, IIP, PMI, NSE sector performance) and major historical cycles.
Advanced Geopolitical Risk Modeling for Investment Decisions
A rigorous, quantitative approach to treating geopolitical risk as an investable factor rather than headline noise. Built for macro-focused investors, fund managers, and senior finance professionals, this course covers the transmission channels through which geopolitical shocks hit trade, currencies, commodities, and capital flows, how to build and use a geopolitical risk index, scenario analysis and stress-testing for portfolios, and sector- and asset-class-level sensitivities. Anchored throughout in Indian market context: India VIX, Nifty drawdowns, RBI intervention, FPI flows, and real events including Balakot, Covid-19, and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Global Macro Investing: Currency, Rates, and Cross Border Flows
An advanced course for experienced Indian investors, active traders and HNIs who want to understand the global forces that move the Nifty, the rupee and G-Sec yields. Covers how interest rates, central bank policy, currency mechanics and cross border capital flows connect, with the RBI, USD/INR, FPI flows, bond index inclusion and the US dollar cycle at the centre. Ends with a practical framework for forming a macro view and expressing it through NSE-listed products.
Practice Drills: Building a Top Down Macro Investment Thesis
An advanced hands-on drill course for macro-focused investors, senior finance professionals and fund managers who allocate top down. You build one complete macro investment thesis on India from scratch: frame the macro question and your variant view against consensus, build a macro dashboard from RBI, MOSPI and CGA data, read the policy path from rates, liquidity and the yield curve, overlay US rates, the dollar, crude and FPI flows, trace the transmission chain from macro driver to corporate earnings, check what Nifty valuations already price in, rank sectors by macro sensitivity, pick the stocks and instruments that carry the exposure most cleanly, size and hedge the positions, build probability-weighted scenarios with signposts and kill criteria, test the process on India's 2022 rate hike cycle, and write the full thesis memo.
- How to frame a macro question and state a variant view that differs from the consensus already in prices
- How to build and read an India macro dashboard from RBI, MOSPI, CGA and NSE data, including rates, liquidity and the yield curve
- How to overlay global drivers such as US rates, the dollar, crude oil and FPI flows on a domestic view
Practice Drills: Mapping a Fed Tightening Cycle to Emerging Market Fund Flows
An advanced hands-on drill course for macro-focused investors, senior finance professionals and fund managers who allocate top down. You map one complete Fed tightening cycle to emerging market fund flows from start to finish: lay out the transmission chain from the fed funds rate to an FPI sell order, date a tightening cycle from FOMC decisions, the dot plot and real yields, track the dollar index, the US 10-year yield and the US-India rate differential, read NSDL FPI data by equity, debt, primary and secondary flows, separate active money from passive and index flows, benchmark India against Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and Indonesia, rebuild the 2022 to 2023 cycle move by move against FPI flows, the rupee and the Nifty, see why DII and SIP money absorbed the selling, compare 2013's taper tantrum with 2022, estimate flow sensitivity with a simple regression, map which sectors and stocks FPIs sell first, build an early warning dashboard and write the full flow map memo.
- How a Fed tightening cycle travels through US real yields, the dollar and the rate differential to emerging market portfolio flows
- How to date a tightening cycle and read the FOMC dot plot, real yields and the dollar index as flow signals
- How to read NSDL FPI data and separate equity, debt, primary, secondary, active and passive flows
Practice Drills: Modeling a Debt Sustainability Scenario for a Sovereign
A hands-on drill course for macro investors, fund managers and senior finance professionals who want to stop quoting other people's debt sustainability conclusions and start producing their own. You build one model, for India's general government, and use it in every drill. First you lay out the workbook, pull baseline inputs from the Union Budget, RBI and IMF sources, and decide what counts as debt. Then you code the debt dynamics equation year by year, back out the effective interest rate, solve for the debt-stabilising primary balance and reconcile your model to reported debt with stock-flow adjustments. You project a five-year baseline, compute gross financing needs, then shock it: growth, interest rate, primary balance, currency, contingent liability and combined scenarios, finishing with a Monte Carlo fan chart in Python. Finally you read the results as a heat map, test the model on Sri Lanka before its 2022 default, and write the scenario note an investment committee would actually read. All figures in INR with Indian sources.
- Lay out a sovereign DSA workbook with clean separation of inputs, engine and outputs
- Assemble baseline inputs from the Union Budget, RBI and IMF sources and choose the right debt perimeter
- Code the debt dynamics equation and back out the effective interest rate from interest paid and the debt stock
Practice Drills: Scoring Geopolitical Risk for a Cross Border Investment
A hands-on drill course for macro-focused investors, fund managers, and senior finance professionals who have to put a number on geopolitical risk before capital crosses a border. You work through one simulated case end to end: a sample NSE-listed Indian manufacturer choosing between three candidate countries for its first overseas plant. You will design a scoring framework with anchored scales and deal-specific weights, gather evidence and score each country on political stability, regulatory and expropriation risk, sanctions and alignment, conflict exposure, currency convertibility, and the bilateral relationship with India. You will then convert the scores into a country risk premium and a scenario-weighted NPV, test which assumptions flip the ranking, and structure the deal using political risk insurance, treaty routing, staged capital, hedging, and the FEMA Overseas Investment rules. The course closes with a trigger-based monitoring dashboard and a complete investment committee memo.
- How to design a geopolitical risk scorecard with clear dimensions, anchored 1 to 5 scales, and weights matched to the deal
- How to gather and grade evidence from public sources before assigning any score
- How to score political, regulatory, sanctions, conflict, currency, and India-specific bilateral risk consistently across countries
Understanding Currency Wars and Competitive Devaluation
An advanced, macro-focused look at how competitive devaluation actually works, built for macro investors, senior finance professionals, and fund managers who need to read currency conflict as a market signal rather than headline noise. Starts with what a currency war is and traces the lineage from the 1930s beggar-thy-neighbor devaluations through the 2010 'currency war' era of Fed QE spillovers. Goes deep into the mechanics: how central banks devalue through rate cuts, direct intervention, and jawboning, how the RBI defends the rupee using its forex reserves, whether devaluation actually fixes trade balances via the J-curve, and how the impossible trinity constrains every emerging market including India. Closes with real case studies, China's yuan management, Japan's yen and the carry trade, and how Indian markets, from IT exporters to oil importers to the Nifty itself, react when a currency war breaks out, ending in a practical framework for positioning a portfolio against currency war risk.
- Define a currency war and distinguish genuine competitive devaluation from normal exchange rate movement
- Trace the historical lineage from the 1930s devaluations to the 2010 currency war era and its QE spillovers
- Explain how central banks devalue in practice, through rate cuts, direct FX intervention, and forward guidance
Understanding Global Liquidity Cycles and Central Bank Coordination
An advanced framework for reading the global liquidity cycle, built for macro-focused investors, fund managers, and senior finance professionals who need to move past headline Fed rate calls. Covers what global liquidity actually is beyond money supply, the mechanics of the Fed balance sheet (QE, QT, reserves, RRP, TGA), how policy from the 'core four' central banks (Fed, ECB, BOJ, PBOC) transmits into FPI flows, the rupee, and Indian markets, where central banks coordinate and where they diverge, and how gold, equities, and crypto each behave as liquidity assets. Anchored throughout in Indian context: RBI's MPC, forex reserves, FPI/FII data, NSE and BSE price action, and real episodes including the 2013 taper tantrum and the 2022 global tightening cycle.
- Define the global liquidity cycle beyond simple money supply, including credit and cross-border flow proxies
- Explain Fed balance sheet mechanics, including QE, QT, reserves, the reverse repo facility, and the TGA
- Trace how Fed and other major central bank policy transmits into FPI flows, the rupee, and Indian equities
Understanding Long Term Debt Cycles, A Ray Dalio Style Framework
An advanced macro framework built for fund managers, senior finance professionals, and macro-focused investors who need to place current market conditions within the arc of a long-term debt cycle rather than just the next business cycle. Built around Ray Dalio's model from 'How the Economic Machine Works' and 'Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises', this course covers the three forces that drive economies (productivity growth, the short-term debt cycle, and the long-term debt cycle), how debt bubbles build over decades, the mechanics of deleveraging and Dalio's four levers (austerity, default and restructuring, wealth transfer, and money printing), and what separates a 'beautiful deleveraging' from an ugly one. It works through real case studies including the US Great Depression, Weimar Germany's hyperinflation, the post-2008 US deleveraging, and Japan's lost decades, then applies the framework directly to India: the 2014-2020 bank NPA crisis, the IL&FS shadow banking shock, and where India's credit cycle stands today. The final chapter turns the framework into a practical toolkit for reading indicators and positioning a portfolio across debt cycle stages.
- Explain the three forces Ray Dalio identifies as driving all economies: productivity growth, the short-term debt cycle, and the long-term debt cycle
- Trace how debt-to-income ratios build into a long-term debt cycle bubble over decades, and identify warning signs near the top
- Describe the deleveraging process and Dalio's four levers: austerity, debt default and restructuring, wealth transfer, and money printing
Understanding Structural Shifts in Global Trade and Supply Chains
An advanced framework for macro-focused investors, fund managers, and senior finance professionals on the structural realignment of global trade and supply chains. Covers the end of hyperglobalization and its fracture points (2008, the US-China trade war, COVID, Russia-Ukraine), the new toolkit of economic statecraft (tariffs, sanctions, export controls, industrial policy), the leading indicators that signal supply chain stress before it hits earnings, the great manufacturing realignment across ASEAN, Mexico, and semiconductors, India's specific position as a China+1 beneficiary with its own import vulnerabilities, and a forward-looking scenario framework for translating these shifts into sector and portfolio decisions. Anchored throughout in Indian context: PLI schemes, NSE and BSE sector performance, RBI and commerce ministry data, and real episodes from the last two decades of trade realignment.
- Explain why the hyperglobalization era broke down, from the 2008 crisis through COVID and the Russia-Ukraine shock
- Understand tariffs, sanctions, export controls and industrial policy as tools of economic statecraft, and how markets price them
- Read supply chain stress before it hits earnings, using shipping rates, PMI new orders and inventory-to-sales data
Understanding the Interplay Between Fiscal and Monetary Policy
Fiscal policy and monetary policy are usually taught as separate subjects, but markets never react to them separately. This course builds a single framework for reading the Union Budget and the RBI's MPC decisions together, understanding how they transmit through bond yields, inflation, credit and the real economy, and using that combined signal to form a top-down macro view as an investor.
- How fiscal policy (the Union Budget, fiscal deficit, government borrowing) and monetary policy (the RBI's repo rate, OMOs, liquidity stance) actually move markets
- The transmission mechanisms linking fiscal deficits to bond yields and inflation, and repo rate changes to the real economy
- Crowding out vs crowding in, and how to tell which regime India is in at a given time
Alternative Investing
21 courses
Advanced Angel Investing: Leading Rounds and Structuring Syndicates
A practitioner course for angels ready to stop following and start leading. Covers what a lead investor actually owes the founder and the co-investors, how to build deal flow and run diligence that others can rely on, and how to price and negotiate a round from the lead's chair: valuation, option pools, instrument choice between CCPS, CCDs and iSAFE notes, and the handful of terms a lead must win. Devotes a full chapter to structuring the syndicate itself, comparing direct cap table entries, SPVs and SEBI-registered angel funds, with the carry and fee economics of each. Works through the tax, FEMA and Companies Act private placement rules that trip up Indian syndicates, then closes with life after the cheque: board and information rights, syndicate communication, bridge and down rounds, distributions, and building a repeatable syndicate with a real track record. Built for HNIs, family office investors and experienced angels who already understand term sheets and cap tables.
- Decide when you have earned the right to lead a round, and what leading costs you
- Build proprietary deal flow and run diligence that co-investors can rely on
- Write an investment memo that raises a syndicate instead of just describing a startup
Advanced Commodity Trading: Spread Trading and Roll Yield
Most commodity traders bet on direction. Professionals trade relationships: one contract month against another, gold against silver, crude against its refined products. This course treats the futures curve as a trading surface. You will decompose futures returns into spot return, roll yield and collateral yield, see why a buy-and-roll position in crude can lose money even when spot prices rise, and learn to price, size and execute calendar, inter-commodity, crack, crush and inter-exchange spreads on MCX and NCDEX. It closes with the risks that blow spreads up, the Indian tax treatment of commodity futures, and how HNIs and family offices can use commodity carry as a portfolio sleeve. Built for experienced traders and investors who already understand futures pricing and cost of carry.
- How to read the MCX futures curve and what contango and backwardation signal about supply, storage and demand
- How to decompose a commodity futures return into spot return, roll yield and collateral yield, and why roll yield dominates over long holding periods
- How to price a calendar spread against cost-of-carry fair value and spot when it is mispriced
Advanced Due Diligence Frameworks for Private Market Investments
A rigorous, India-specific playbook for diligencing private market deals and the funds that make them. Build a repeatable process from first screen to investment memo, then go deep on the four pillars that decide outcomes: the business, the numbers, the legal and regulatory position, and the people. Learn to rebuild revenue quality from GST returns and bank statements, run MCA and litigation searches, read a shareholders' agreement for the clauses that actually move money, test a startup's unit economics and a founder's background, and diligence an AIF manager on track record, fees and governance. Finish with a scoring framework, red-flag library and two full Indian case studies. Built for HNIs and family offices writing private cheques, angel syndicate leads running deals for co-investors, and experienced traders moving into unlisted assets.
Advanced Forex Strategies: Carry Trade and Interest Rate Differentials
A practitioner course on the carry trade as a strategy rather than a textbook anomaly. Built for HNIs, family office investors, active currency traders and experienced angels who already understand interest rate parity and want to know how carry is actually measured, built, sized, hedged and unwound. Covers how to read rate differentials from forward points and OIS curves, real versus nominal carry, single-pair and cross-sectional basket construction, volatility scaling, combining carry with momentum and value, and the anatomy of carry crashes from 2008 to the August 2024 yen unwind. Closes with what Indian residents can legally do under RBI's exchange-traded currency derivative rules on NSE and BSE, sizing and rollover costs, taxation, and treating unhedged offshore allocations as the implicit carry trade they are.
- Explain why carry earns a return even though uncovered interest parity says it should not
- Measure carry precisely from forward points, implied yields and carry-to-volatility ratios
- Read where rate differentials are heading from policy guidance and OIS curves
Advanced Real Estate Structuring: REITs, InvITs, and Fractional Ownership Compared
The same office park can reach you as a listed REIT unit, an InvIT-style yield vehicle, an SM REIT scheme or a legacy fractional SPV share, and each wrapper hands you a different cash flow, tax bill, governance position and exit. This course takes the structures apart layer by layer: trust, HoldCo, SPV, sponsor and manager. Learn SEBI's asset, leverage and distribution rules for REITs and InvITs, how concession-based InvIT NAVs run down, how the 2024 SM REIT framework reset fractional ownership, and how each distribution component is taxed in a unitholder's hands. Finish by comparing yield, NAV discount, rate sensitivity and exit cost across structures, and building a real asset income sleeve for an HNI or family office portfolio. Built for HNIs and family offices, angel syndicate leads, and experienced traders adding real assets.
- Trace a rupee of rent or toll from the tenant or road user, through the SPV, HoldCo and trust, to your bank account
- Apply SEBI's asset composition, leverage and sponsor rules to judge how safe a REIT or InvIT structure really is
- Explain why a concession-based InvIT's NAV runs down and value it without being fooled by a high yield
Case Study: A Family Office's Alternative Asset Allocation During a Market Downturn
An advanced case study that puts you inside the investment committee of a composite Indian family office as the COVID crash of 2020 unfolds. The family holds listed equity, debt, gold, REITs, real estate, private equity and venture funds, private credit AIFs and a Category III long-short fund. You start with the pre-crisis allocation and its hidden fault lines, then live through February to April 2020 as the Nifty falls by more than a third in weeks, Franklin Templeton winds up six debt schemes, the RBI announces a loan moratorium and fund managers keep sending capital calls. You examine how each alternative asset class actually behaved under stress, why illiquid holdings looked deceptively calm, and how the denominator effect pushed the portfolio outside its own limits. You then work through the committee's real decisions: funding commitments without selling at the bottom, whether to rebalance, and when to go on offence. The case closes by scoring the outcome through the 2021 recovery and distilling a downturn-ready playbook. The family and its numbers are an illustrative composite; the market events, regulations and asset-class behaviour are real.
- Read a family office's total allocation and spot liquidity, concentration and unfunded-commitment risk before a crisis
- Trace how the 2020 Indian market crash unfolded and how fast it moved through listed and unlisted holdings
- Explain why mark-to-model alternatives look calm in a crash and how the denominator effect breaks allocation limits
Case Study: DLF's Real Estate Debt Restructuring, A Development Financing Case Study
DLF listed in 2007 with the largest IPO India had seen, a vast land bank and a balance sheet built for a boom that ended a year later. This case study follows how development finance actually works in India (land funding, construction loans, customer advances, lease rental discounting), how DLF's debt built up and why the 2008 crisis hit a leveraged developer from every side at once, and how the group spent the next decade deleveraging through non-core asset sales, refinancing, the 2017 GIC deal on its rental arm and fresh promoter and QIP equity. Along the way it covers the governance overhangs that complicated the turnaround and how RERA changed developer financing. Built for HNI and family office investors, angel and syndicate leads who back real asset businesses, and active traders who want to read a developer's balance sheet before the market does.
- How Indian real estate development is financed, from land acquisition through construction loans, customer advances and lease rental discounting
- Why DLF's post-IPO expansion left it exposed when the 2008 crisis froze sales, prices and refinancing at the same time
- Which balance sheet and cash flow metrics flagged the stress early, and how to compute them for any developer
Case Study: Sequoia India's Early Bet on Byju's, A Syndicate Structuring Lens
Sequoia Capital India, now Peak XV Partners, backed Byju's when it was a profitable test-prep business in Bengaluru. Over the next seven years the company raised money from Sofina, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Tencent, General Atlantic, Prosus and many others, reached a reported valuation of about $22 billion, and then unravelled through delayed audits, board resignations, a deeply discounted rights issue, lender litigation and insolvency proceedings. This case study reads the whole story from the investor side of the table. It looks at how each round was led and syndicated, what rights early investors held, why a fragmented syndicate struggled to enforce those rights when governance broke down, and how the down round and markdowns played out. It closes with a practical playbook for angel syndicate leads and family offices: how to structure a syndicate vehicle in India, which term sheet clauses matter most, and a capstone exercise structuring a round for a fast-growing company.
- How Sequoia India's thesis on Byju's was built and what a lead investor contributes beyond the cheque
- How a cap table fills up across many rounds and what pro rata, board seats and information rights actually give an investor
- How liquidation preferences stack across rounds and how dilution moves an early investor's ownership
Case Study: The 2021 Lumber and Commodity Supercycle
In the spring of 2020 US lumber futures traded at multi-year lows. A year later they had gone up nearly sevenfold, and within months of that peak they had given most of it back. Lumber was the loudest signal of a much wider boom: copper hit a record, iron ore crossed $200 a tonne, steel prices in India jumped, and by 2021 Wall Street banks were openly calling a new commodity supercycle. This case study rebuilds the episode from the ground up. It explains what a supercycle actually is, why lumber became its poster child, how a thin futures contract amplified a real supply squeeze, and how the boom spread across industrial metals, energy and agriculture. It then follows the money into India: the Nifty Metal rally and the earnings peak of steel and aluminium producers, the margin squeeze on paint, FMCG, auto and plywood companies, and the export duties on steel and iron ore that the government imposed in May 2022 and rolled back that November. It closes with a working framework for experienced investors, HNIs and family offices: how to separate a structural supercycle from a temporary supply shock, how to value cyclicals near peak earnings, what roll yield does to commodity returns, and which access routes Indian investors actually have.
- What a commodity supercycle is in the economic literature, and why most commodity booms do not qualify
- How pandemic stimulus, a housing and renovation boom and cut sawmill capacity combined to send lumber futures to record highs in 2021
- How to read a futures curve in backwardation, and how limit moves and thin open interest amplified lumber's spike and its collapse
Case Study: The Collapse of a High Profile Startup Syndicate Deal
This case study follows an illustrative composite deal, built from patterns seen in real Indian startup failures, from the WhatsApp message that announced an oversubscribed syndicate round to the write-off letter members received eighteen months later. You will see how allocation scarcity compressed diligence, how inflated revenue and undisclosed related party dealings hid in a data room nobody read closely, how a term sheet with waived conditions left the syndicate without a voice, and how the money actually flowed back (or did not) in the wind-down waterfall. It closes with the duties a syndicate lead owes members, the regulatory and tax aftermath for investors under SEBI's angel fund framework, and a practical diligence checklist and lead-scoring framework for your next deal.
- How a syndicate round is pooled and structured in India, through SEBI angel funds, platform SPVs and direct cap table entry
- How allocation scarcity and social proof shorten diligence, and the red flags a data room shows if you actually read it
- How to test revenue quality and spot round-tripped or inflated sales before you invest
Case Study: The Swiss Franc Shock of 2015, A Forex Black Swan Event
On 15 January 2015, the Swiss National Bank scrapped the 1.20 floor it had held under EUR/CHF for more than three years, without warning and three days after a senior official had called it a cornerstone of policy. The franc jumped by double digits within minutes, liquidity disappeared, stop-losses filled hundreds of pips away, retail brokers were left with client negative balances they could not recover, and at least one hedge fund was nearly wiped out. This case study rebuilds why Switzerland capped its own currency, how the market came to treat the floor as a free option, what actually happened in the minutes after the announcement, and who was hurt and why. It then turns the event into a risk framework for HNI, family office and active currency traders: measuring tail risk that VaR misses, sizing positions to survive a gap, judging broker and counterparty risk, and reading the RBI's management of the rupee, NSE and BSE currency derivatives and offshore LRS holdings through the lens of a peg that broke.
- Why the Swiss National Bank imposed a 1.20 floor on EUR/CHF in 2011 and how it defended it with unlimited intervention
- How a credible-looking peg turned into a crowded, short-volatility consensus trade
- What happened in the minutes after the 15 January 2015 announcement, and why stop-losses failed to protect traders
Practice Drills: Building a Carry Trade Position Using Interest Rate Differentials
A hands-on drill course for HNI and family office investors, active currency and commodity traders, and experienced angels who already understand carry in theory. You will work one sample carry book end to end: turn policy and money market rates into a carry estimate, back the implied differential out of USD/INR forward points and NSE currency futures, adjust for inflation, write a single-pair carry ticket, compute breakeven spot moves and carry-to-volatility ratios, rank exchange-listed pairs by carry, size the book by volatility and margin, roll and mark it, stress it against the 2013 taper tantrum and the August 2024 yen unwind, price an option tail hedge, and write exit rules and a tax record sheet. Every number is worked, every step is repeatable with live quotes from NSE and RBI.
- Convert RBI, MIBOR, T-bill and SOFR rates into an annualised carry estimate for a currency pair
- Back out the implied rate differential from USD/INR forward points and NSE futures prices
- Adjust nominal carry for inflation and decide whether a differential is worth harvesting
Practice Drills: Building a Convertible Note Term Sheet for a Startup Deal
A practice-first companion to Understanding Convertible Notes and SAFEs in Startup Investing. You already know what a valuation cap, a discount and a maturity date are; this course makes you draft them. Working from a sample Indian seed deal, you will check eligibility under the Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Rules and FEMA, pick between a convertible note, a CCD and an iSAFE, then build the term sheet clause by clause: principal and tranches, cap, discount, interest, maturity, the qualified financing trigger, change of control, MFN, pro-rata, information rights and events of default. Every economic term is tested against conversion scenarios in rupees before it goes into the draft. The course closes with two full end-to-end drills and a before-you-sign scorecard. Built for angel syndicate leads, family office investors and HNIs who write the term sheet, not just sign it. Educational content only, not legal or investment advice.
- Check a deal's eligibility for a convertible note under the deposit rules, DPIIT recognition and FEMA before drafting a word
- Choose between a convertible note, a CCD and an iSAFE for a specific deal and defend the choice
- Set a valuation cap and discount from comparable rounds and prove in rupees which one binds in each scenario
Practice Drills: Building a Family Office Style Alternative Asset Allocation Model
A hands-on drill course for HNI and family office investors, angel syndicate leads and active commodity and currency traders who want to run alternatives like an institution. Working from one sample INR 150 crore family balance sheet, you will build a spreadsheet allocation model tab by tab: honest return and risk assumptions for private equity, private credit, real assets and Category III AIFs, unsmoothed volatility, an illiquidity budget tied to the family's cash needs, a factor map of what the book really owns, a commitment pacing engine for capital calls and distributions, liquidity stress tests, and a gross-to-net layer for fees, carry and Indian tax. The course ends with an investment committee memo built from your own model.
- How to lay out an allocation model with clean input, assumption, engine and output tabs
- How to set defensible return, volatility and correlation assumptions for Indian alternatives and why reported AIF returns must be unsmoothed first
- How to size an alternatives sleeve from the family's liquidity needs rather than from a target return
Practice Drills: Structuring a Commodity Spread Trade
A hands-on drill course for active commodity traders and HNI or family office investors who already understand futures pricing and spreads. You will structure three spread trades on MCX from scratch: a gold calendar spread priced against cost-of-carry fair value, a gold-silver ratio trade with rupee-matched leg sizing, and a crude oil calendar spread in a backwardated curve. For each one you set the thesis, entry, target and stop, work out margin and return on capital, and then stress-test it against legging slippage, correlation breaks, curve flips and expiry traps. The course closes with a one-page trade ticket and the Indian tax treatment of commodity futures P&L.
- How to turn MCX contract specifications into spread arithmetic: lot values, tick values and spread P&L per point
- How to price a calendar spread against cost-of-carry fair value and decide whether to buy or sell it
- How to size an inter-commodity spread so both legs carry matched rupee exposure using full and mini lots
Practice Drills: Structuring a Real Estate Development Financing Deal
A drill-heavy course for family office investors, angel syndicate leads and active traders moving into private real estate credit and equity. You work on one sample residential project in Thane from land purchase to possession. You build its cost stack and sales forecast, find the month by month funding gap, size a bank construction loan, price a credit AIF mezzanine NCD, split the equity between developer and investor, write the waterfall, covenants and security package, stress test the whole structure against delay, price and cost shocks, compute every party's returns, and finish by writing the term sheet and IC memo. All deal numbers are illustrative.
- Build a development project's full cost stack and month by month cash flow
- Forecast sales and collections under RERA's 70 percent escrow rule
- Find the funding gap and size senior construction finance against it
Understanding Commodity Market Manipulation and Regulatory Safeguards
An advanced course on how commodity prices get manipulated, and what stands in the way. Starts with the mechanics: corners, squeezes, spoofing, wash trades and settlement price games, and why thin, delivery-linked commodity markets are easier to push around than large-cap equities. Works through the cases that rewrote the rules, from the Hunt brothers' silver corner and Sumitomo's copper squeeze to the NSEL collapse, the 2012 guar spike on NCDEX, the JPMorgan spoofing desk and the LME nickel cancellation of 2022. Then maps India's defences in detail: the FMC to SEBI merger, the PFUTP Regulations, position limits, margins, price bands, warehousing and exchange surveillance on MCX and NCDEX. Closes with a practical toolkit for spotting manipulation in price, volume and open interest data, judging platform and counterparty risk, and knowing where aggressive trading crosses the legal line. Built for HNIs, family offices and active commodity traders who already understand futures and hedging.
- Explain why commodity markets are structurally more exposed to manipulation than large-cap equities
- Recognise corners, squeezes, spoofing, layering, wash trades and banging the close from market data
- Draw the real lessons from the Hunt brothers, Sumitomo, NSEL, guar, JPMorgan and LME nickel cases
Understanding Convertible Notes and SAFEs in Startup Investing
An advanced, India-specific deep dive into the instruments that fund most early-stage rounds before a price is set. Learn why startups delay pricing, how convertible notes, SAFEs, iSAFEs and CCDs differ, and how the Companies Act deposit rules, DPIIT recognition and FEMA shape what Indian and NRI investors can actually sign. Master the valuation cap, discount, interest and maturity terms, run full conversion maths for notes and pre-money vs post-money SAFEs, and see what happens when several convertibles stack into one priced round. Work through down rounds, shutdowns, tax treatment on conversion and exit, then read a convertible term sheet clause by clause and follow a syndicate lead's ₹50 lakh note through two rounds to exit. Built for HNI and family office investors and experienced angel syndicate leads.
Understanding Family Office Allocation to Alternative Assets
An advanced, India-specific guide to how family offices think about, size and run allocations to alternative assets. Learn what separates a single family office from a multi-family office or a promoter treasury, why long horizons and patient capital tilt these portfolios toward private markets, and how to write an investment policy statement with liquidity buckets and risk budgets. Work through the alternatives menu from the allocator's desk: PE and VC fund commitments and co-investments, private credit, real assets, Category III AIF strategies and commodity and currency hedges. Master the mechanics that decide outcomes in a private markets programme: commitment pacing, capital calls, the denominator effect, vintage diversification, manager dispersion and fee drag. Map the Indian regulatory and tax terrain across AIFs, PMS, LRS, GIFT City and holding structures, then apply it all in two full case studies. Built for HNIs and family office investors, angel syndicate leads managing co-investor capital, and experienced traders stepping into multi-asset allocation.
Understanding Forex Market Interventions by Central Banks
An advanced course on central bank currency intervention as it actually works, not as it is headlined. Built for HNIs, family office investors, active currency and commodity traders and experienced angels who already understand what moves the rupee and now want to understand the hand that leans on it. Covers why central banks intervene, the full instrument set (spot, forwards, NDFs, buy/sell swaps and verbal guidance), sterilisation and its liquidity consequences, the portfolio balance and signalling channels, reserve adequacy, and the politics of the US Treasury monitoring list. Goes deep on the RBI's managed float, its forward book and swap windows, with case studies from 2013 and 2022, then compares the SNB, Japan's Ministry of Finance, the PBoC and the Hong Kong currency board. Closes with how to read RBI data, detect intervention in real time, price and trade around it, and hedge offshore allocations when the RBI is in the market.
- Explain why a central bank intervenes and what it is actually trying to control
- Distinguish spot, forward, NDF, swap and verbal intervention and what each does to reserves and liquidity
- Trace how sterilised and unsterilised intervention flow through to money market rates and bond yields
Understanding Real Estate Private Equity and Development Financing
An advanced course on how Indian real estate projects are really funded, and where a private investor can sit in that funding. Starts with the capital stack of a development project, from land and approvals through construction and sales, and explains why developers turn to NBFCs, real estate credit AIFs and private equity when bank funding runs short. Covers the instruments in detail: construction finance, lease rental discounting, structured NCDs, mezzanine debt and preferred equity, along with the escrow, cash sweep and security structures lenders use and the RERA escrow rule that reshaped project funding. Unpacks how real estate private equity funds are built, from core to opportunistic strategies, Category II AIF structures, hurdle rates, carried interest and distribution waterfalls, and the platform deals global and domestic investors strike with Indian developers. Then works through underwriting a development deal end to end, with a full pro forma, IRR and equity multiple, and sensitivity to price, absorption and delay. Closes with risk and distress, including the 2018 to 2020 credit crunch, SWAMIH and IBC resolution, exit routes, fund due diligence, taxation of returns, and a decision checklist before committing capital. Built for HNIs, family office investors and experienced syndicate leads evaluating real estate AIFs and structured deals.
- Map every layer of a development project's capital stack and who funds each one in India
- Explain why developers pay 16 to 22 percent for private capital when banks charge far less
- Compare construction finance, LRD, structured NCDs, mezzanine debt and preferred equity
Tax & Wealth Planning
19 courses
Advanced Charitable Giving and Tax Efficient Philanthropy Structures
A practitioner-level course on how serious philanthropy actually gets structured in India: which deductions survive scrutiny, when a private foundation makes sense over ad hoc giving, and how CSR, trust law and cross-border rules interact for HNIs, business owners and family offices.
- How to claim Section 80G deductions correctly and avoid the documentation gaps that trigger scrutiny
- How CSR obligations under Section 135 interact with a business owner's personal giving and 80G claims
- When anonymous donations lose their tax shelter under Section 115BBC
Advanced Estate Planning: Cross Border Inheritance Considerations
An advanced course for high net worth individuals, business owners with complex income and family offices whose wealth, heirs or assets now span more than one country. Start with why residency, domicile and citizenship each pull in a different direction under Indian and foreign law, and what the RNOR window actually lets a returning NRI do. Work through how Indian succession law behaves when an estate crosses a border: intestate succession under personal law, will validity and probate recognition abroad, and the specific collision between forced heirship regimes overseas and testamentary freedom under Indian law. Finish with the structuring layer, trusts, power of attorney, nomination and family office governance, and what each vehicle actually achieves once more than one jurisdiction is involved. Country-specific corridors and treaty detail build on this foundation in later chapters.
- Tell residency, domicile and citizenship apart and know which one governs which decision
- Use RNOR status correctly in a cross-border wealth transfer plan
- Map a family's assets, heirs and jurisdictions before a succession event forces the issue
Advanced GST Planning for Business Owners
An advanced, India-specific GST course for owners and promoters who already file returns and now want to manage GST as a lever on margin, working capital and risk. Starting from the post-September 2025 GST 2.0 rate structure, you will work through place and time of supply, turnover thresholds, and the conditions and blocks that decide whether input tax credit is real money or a write-off. Learn to protect credit with GSTR-2B and the Invoice Management System, recover cash stuck in inverted duty structures, choose between one GSTIN and many, handle mandatory Input Service Distributor rules and value related-party supplies correctly. Then apply it to pricing and contracts, discounts and credit notes, reverse charge, exports under LUT, business transfers, bundled supplies and e-commerce TCS. Finish by building a monthly GST close, preparing for GSTR-9 and 9C, reading notices under Sections 73, 74 and 74A, calculating real exposure, and deciding when an appeal to the GST Appellate Tribunal is worth the pre-deposit.
- Map every invoice to the correct supply type, place of supply, time of supply and post-2025 rate
- Test each input tax credit against Section 16 conditions and the Section 17(5) blocked list
- Use GSTR-2B, IMS and vendor controls to stop losing credit you have already paid for
Advanced NRI Taxation: Residential Status and Global Income Rules
An advanced, India-specific course for NRIs, returning Indians, globally mobile professionals, business owners and family offices who need to get residential status right before anything else. Work through the 182-day and 60/365-day tests, the exceptions for Indians leaving for employment and visiting PIOs, the ₹15 lakh Indian-income trigger and deemed residency. Use the RNOR window deliberately when you return. Count days correctly, build year-of-departure and year-of-return timelines, and assemble the evidence the tax department asks for. Then map exactly what India can tax: income received or accruing in India, deemed accrual, NRE, NRO and FCNR interest, rent, salary and business connection, plus global income and Schedule FA once you turn resident. Finish with capital gains and TDS for NRIs: Section 195 withholding, equity and mutual fund rates after July 2024, selling Indian property, lower-deduction certificates, repatriation, refunds and the NRI return. Section references follow the Income-tax Act, 2025, with the 1961 Act equivalent shown where it helps.
- Determine residential status for any tax year using the day-count tests, exceptions and deemed residency rules
- Plan the year of departure and the year of return to use the RNOR window deliberately
- Count days of stay correctly and assemble the documents that prove your status
Advanced Tax Planning for High Net Worth Individuals
An advanced, India-specific course for high net worth individuals, business owners and family offices who have outgrown basic tax saving. Work out your real effective rate once surcharge and marginal relief kick in, and decide between the old and new regimes at high incomes. Plan capital gains at scale after the 2024 reset, harvest losses properly and use Sections 54, 54F and 54EC within their caps. Compare how direct equity, PMS, mutual funds, AIFs, debt instruments, REITs, InvITs, GIFT City funds and high-premium ULIPs are taxed. Structure how a business owner draws money out of a company or LLP, and use HUFs, gifts and private trusts without falling foul of the clubbing rules. Understand succession, inherited cost basis and family offices, then handle residency, LRS, TCS and foreign asset disclosure. Finish with GAAR, the scrutiny triggers for HNI returns, and a full-year tax plan for a ₹5 crore family.
- Calculate your true effective tax rate including surcharge, cess and marginal relief
- Plan large capital gains using harvesting, set-off and reinvestment exemptions
- Choose between direct equity, PMS, mutual funds, AIFs and other wrappers on a post-tax basis
Case Study: A Benami Transaction Case and Its Regulatory Fallout
An advanced case study that walks through a benami matter from the first quiet name-lending decision to the final bill. A composite Indian business family spent fifteen years parking assets in other people's names: a flat registered to the company driver, farmland in a farm manager's name, listed shares in a relative's demat account and cash routed through friends. You see how the tax department's data trail surfaced it, how the paper owner received the first notice, and how the Initiating Officer moved to show cause and provisional attachment. You then follow the defence before the Adjudicating Authority asset by asset, the appeal route, and the retrospectivity question the Supreme Court reopened in the Ganpati Dealcom litigation. The fallout spreads beyond the benami law into an income tax reassessment, money-laundering exposure, broker and SEBI consequences, and the banking and reputational costs nobody budgets for. The case closes by totting up the full cost, looking at the exposure of the people who lent their names, pricing what a clean structure would have cost, and distilling a clean-up playbook for families and their advisors. The family and its numbers are an illustrative composite; the laws, procedures and court rulings are real.
- Trace how a family's informal name-lending habits turn into benami arrangements under the 2016 law
- Explain how the tax department's data trail (AIS, SFT reporting, property registration and demat records) surfaces benami holdings
- Follow the full enforcement sequence from show cause notice and provisional attachment to adjudication, confiscation and appeal
Case Study: An ESOP Exit's Tax Planning During a Startup Acquisition
An acquisition is usually the single largest tax event in an ESOP holder's life, and most of the planning has to happen in the weeks before closing, not at return-filing time. This case study follows Vistarlok Technologies, an illustrative Pune B2B SaaS startup built from real Indian deal practice, as it is bought by a listed Indian acquirer for a mix of cash, acquirer shares, an escrow holdback and an earn-out. You meet four employees whose ESOP positions could not be more different: an early engineer holding exercised shares for years, a manager with vested but unexercised options, a recent joiner whose unvested options are rolled into the acquirer's plan, and a senior executive who used the eligible startup tax deferral. You read the deal documents through a tax lens, decide whether to exercise before closing or take a cash-out, time the sale around the 24-month long-term line, fund advance tax on consideration that has not all arrived, and tax each leg of the price, including acquirer shares and contingent payments. The course closes with surcharge and marginal relief on a crore-plus payout, reinvestment and loss set-off, gifting to family, a side-by-side scorecard of the four after-tax outcomes, and a pre-signing checklist. Built for HNIs with large ESOP holdings, founders and business owners with complex income, and family offices managing startup wealth. Educational content only, not tax advice.
- Read an acquisition term sheet and map every component of the price, and every option treatment, to the tax it triggers
- Decide between exercising options before closing and accepting a cash-out, with the after-tax numbers to back the choice
- Work out when tax deferred under the eligible startup rules falls due on an exit, and plan the cash to pay it
Case Study: Cross Border Inheritance Planning for an NRI Family
A single running case study follows the Rao family: a Hindu NRI couple in Dubai preparing to return to Bengaluru, a son who is a US citizen with an OCI card, and a daughter who has lived in London for nine years. Their wealth sits in a Bengaluru flat, ancestral farmland in Karnataka, a Zerodha portfolio, Indian mutual funds, NRE and NRO deposits, a Dubai apartment and a US brokerage account. First stress-test what happens if the head of the family dies today with no plan, asset by asset and country by country. Then map the tax exposure in India and in each heir's home country, including TDS on NRI property sales, the USD 1 million repatriation route and foreign estate tax traps. Finish by building the plan: mirror wills, aligned nominations, a private trust decision and the timing of the return to India, ending with a reusable checklist for any NRI family.
- Build a complete family file: residential status, citizenship and domicile for every member, and the legal location of every asset
- Trace exactly what happens to each asset class when an NRI dies without a plan, and which law governs each one
- Apply FEMA rules on what NRI and OCI heirs can inherit, hold and repatriate, including agricultural land
Case Study: How a Business Family Structured a Multi Generational Trust
Most Indian business families know they need a succession plan. Far fewer know what it actually takes to build one that survives the founder, a family quarrel and the arrival of a third generation. This case study follows an illustrative, composite promoter family, the Kulkarni family of Pune, whose patriarch controls a listed engineering company, a family holding company, commercial property and a large investment portfolio. You see what triggered the plan, which vehicles the family rejected and why, how the private discretionary trust was designed to last across generations, which deed clauses mattered, how promoter shares and property were moved in under SEBI's takeover rules, stamp duty and tax, how the trust is taxed and runs its distributions year by year, and how the structure held up when the founder died, siblings disagreed and grandchildren came of age. Built for HNIs, business owners and family office advisers who want to see a trust work end to end before building one of their own.
- How a business family maps its assets, people and fault lines before choosing a succession vehicle
- Why the family chose a private discretionary trust over a will, an HUF or a holding company alone, and what each alternative would have cost them
- How a trust is designed to last across generations, within the limits Indian property law puts on gifts to unborn beneficiaries
Case Study: Structuring Charitable Giving Through a Family Foundation
A single running case study follows the Kapadia family: a Pune promoter family whose listed auto-components company also carries a CSR obligation, and who want to move from scattered cheque donations to one organised family foundation. Start with the brief and what the family really wants from its giving. Compare direct 80G giving, a registered public charitable trust and a Section 8 company, and watch the family pick one. Then build it: the charter, the registration sequence under Section 12AB, Section 80G and CSR-1, funding with cash and listed shares, and routing company CSR money without breaking the rules. Finish with the compliance engine that keeps the exemption alive, the traps that cost families their registration, a five-year numbers review and a reusable playbook for any family.
- Turn a family's loose wish to give into a written brief with causes, budget, control and legacy goals
- Cost the family's current ad hoc giving and see exactly what a structure would change
- Compare direct 80G giving, a public charitable trust and a Section 8 company on tax, control, cost and permanence
Practice Drills: Building an LRS Compliant Overseas Investment Plan
A drill course for HNIs, business owners and family office teams who understand the LRS and its tax rules but have never built a full overseas investment plan end to end. You work on one sample family throughout: setting the plan template, mapping and classifying every remittance, sizing and sequencing transfers across members and years, modelling TCS cash flow, choosing between routes on cost, stress-testing estate and withholding exposure, and projecting tax, foreign tax credit and Schedule FA reporting. You finish by auditing a deliberately flawed plan and writing the family's one-page LRS investment policy and compliance calendar. Educational content only, not investment or tax advice.
- Turn a family's overseas allocation goal into a written, checkable LRS investment plan
- Map every proposed remittance to its limit, purpose code and permitted route before money moves
- Classify proposed holdings as OPI or ODI and spot the ones that need a different structure
Practice Drills: Calculating Tax on an ESOP Exercise and Sale Event
A practice-first course for employees with large ESOP and RSU holdings, founders and business owners with complex income, and family office teams who plan around equity liquidity events. You work through a set of sample employees and grants and calculate every rupee of tax yourself. First the exercise event: the perquisite value using listed-share FMV or a merchant banker valuation, slab tax, surcharge and marginal relief, employer TDS, and the deferral available to employees of eligible startups. Then the sale event: cost of acquisition, holding period, short-term versus long-term classification for listed, unlisted and foreign shares, and the effect of sell-to-cover and same-day sales. You then handle the special cases that trip up high earners: RSUs from a US parent with exchange-rate conversion and foreign tax credit, selling foreign shares and reporting them, and company buybacks or liquidity programmes. The course closes with three full drills that run a grant from exercise to exit and reconcile the result against Form 16, AIS and the return. Educational content only, not tax advice.
- Compute the taxable perquisite on an ESOP exercise for a listed company and an unlisted startup, using the correct FMV rule for each
- Calculate slab tax, surcharge, marginal relief, cess and employer TDS on a large perquisite year
- Work out when deferred perquisite tax at an eligible startup falls due, and what triggers it early
Practice Drills: Structuring a Family Trust for Succession
A simulation course for HNIs, business owners and family office advisers who already understand how private trusts work in India and now want to build one. You are handed the file of a fictional Pune promoter family: a founder in his late sixties holding a stake in a listed auto-components company, an unlisted holding company, commercial and residential property, a son running a leveraged side business, a daughter settled in Singapore and two minor grandchildren. Working as the family's succession adviser, you map every asset to its succession risk, choose the right vehicle, assign the trust roles, draft the deed clauses that matter, settle listed promoter shares without triggering an open offer, move unlisted shares and property into the trust, test every transfer for gift tax, capital gains and clubbing, compute trust tax, handle distributions to the non-resident beneficiary, stress-test asset protection against a creditor claim and tie the trust to a family constitution. You finish by writing the structuring memo and running a full case on a new family. All family figures are illustrative; the rules are real and stated as at the date of last review, under the Indian Trusts Act, 1882 and the Income-tax Act, 2025.
- Map every family asset to its succession risk and pick the vehicle that actually solves it
- Choose between specific and discretionary, revocable and irrevocable structures and defend the choice
- Assign settlor, trustee, protector and beneficiary roles without creating control or tax leaks
Practice Drills: Structuring a Tax Efficient Charitable Giving Plan
A practice-first course for high-net-worth individuals, business owners with complex income and family office teams who give seriously and want every rupee of it to work. You work through a set of sample donors and calculate the outcome yourself. First personal giving: the deduction across each donee category, the qualifying limit on adjusted gross total income, the old versus new regime decision, cash limits and matching your claim to the donee's statement. Then business and promoter giving: a company's CSR obligation, how CSR spend sits alongside a promoter family's personal giving, and the tax result of donating shares or property instead of cash. Then your own giving vehicle: when a family trust beats direct giving, and how to test a trust's books against the application and related-party rules that decide whether its exemption survives. The course closes with three full drills that build and review complete giving plans. Educational content only, not tax advice.
- Compute the deduction on a donation for each donee category, with and without the qualifying limit
- Calculate adjusted gross total income and apply the 10 percent qualifying limit correctly
- Decide whether a large giving year changes the old versus new tax regime choice, with the numbers to prove it
Understanding Benami Transactions and Regulatory Risk
An advanced, India-specific course on the Prohibition of Benami Property Transactions Act, 1988, as overhauled in 2016, built for HNIs, business owners and family offices. Understand exactly what makes a transaction benami, the statutory exceptions that protect genuine family holdings, and why paying for an asset from unexplained money is the fault line. Work through the enforcement machinery from provisional attachment to confiscation, the penalties, and the Supreme Court's turn on retrospective application. See how benami risk overlaps with the income tax law on unexplained investments, the Black Money Act, PMLA and SEBI's actions against mule and name-lending demat accounts. Finish with the everyday situations where legitimate families drift into benami exposure, including property in a relative's name, promoter shares parked with associates and cash-funded purchases, and a practical framework for documenting source of funds and cleaning up legacy holdings.
- Identify the elements that make a transaction or arrangement benami under Indian law
- Apply the statutory exceptions for HUF, fiduciary and family holdings to real situations
- Trace the enforcement process from notice and provisional attachment to confiscation and appeal
Understanding Family Trusts and Succession Structuring in India
An advanced, India-specific course on private family trusts and succession structuring, built for HNIs, business owners and family offices. Understand how a private trust works under the Indian Trusts Act, 1882, the roles of settlor, trustee, beneficiary and protector, and how a trust compares with a will, an HUF and a holding company. Learn the choices that decide everything else: revocable or irrevocable, specific or discretionary, living or testamentary. Work through the tax treatment of settling assets into a trust, of income earned inside it, and of distributions to beneficiaries, including the maximum marginal rate trap for discretionary trusts and clubbing on revocable transfers. Cover the practical mechanics of drafting a trust deed, stamp duty and registration, moving listed shares, unlisted shares and property into a trust, and the SEBI and FEMA angles for promoter holdings and NRI beneficiaries. Finish with succession structures for family businesses, family constitutions, asset protection limits, the disputes that break structures, and case studies of how Indian families have planned, or failed to plan, their succession.
- Explain how a private family trust works and the legal roles of settlor, trustee, beneficiary and protector
- Choose between a will, an HUF, a holding company and a trust for a given family goal
- Distinguish revocable from irrevocable and specific from discretionary trusts, and the tax result of each
Understanding Tax Implications of ESOP Exercises and Startup Exits
An advanced, India-specific guide to the tax consequences of employee equity, built for HNIs with large ESOP holdings, founders and business owners with complex income, and family offices managing startup wealth. Master the two tax events in every ESOP, perquisite tax at exercise and capital gains at sale, and the fair market value, cost and holding period rules that decide how much each one costs you. Learn to time an exercise, fund tax on gains you have not yet received, and use the eligible startup deferral correctly. Work through every major exit route, from buybacks taxed as deemed dividend and secondary sales to investors, to acquisitions with share swaps, earn-outs and escrows, and IPOs followed by a sale on NSE or BSE. Handle foreign parent RSUs, Schedule FA reporting, foreign tax credit and residency changes mid-vesting. Finish with planning for large gains: surcharge caps, loss set-off, reinvesting exit proceeds in a house, gifting shares to family and trusts, and a case study of one ₹5 crore exit with three very different tax outcomes.
- Calculate perquisite tax at exercise and capital gains at sale for listed, unlisted and foreign shares
- Apply fair market value, cost of acquisition and holding period rules without the common errors
- Decide when to exercise and how to fund tax on gains that are still on paper
Understanding Tax Implications of Overseas Investments Under LRS
An advanced, India-specific course for HNIs, business owners and family offices who invest abroad under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme and need to get every rupee of tax and every disclosure right. Start with how LRS works, the USD 250,000 annual limit, what the Overseas Investment Rules 2022 permit and how the OPI vs ODI distinction shapes your tax position. Understand TCS on outward remittances, why it is a prepaid tax and not a cost, and how to plan remittances across family members and financial years. Work through the taxation of foreign shares, international funds and ETFs, dividends, interest, RSUs, ESPPs and overseas property, including currency conversion rules. Claim foreign tax credit correctly through DTAAs and Form 67, and avoid withholding and US estate tax traps. Master Schedule FA, FSI, TR and AL, understand Black Money Act exposure and handle residential status changes. Finish with holding structures, succession planning for foreign assets and a full case study of one family's global portfolio from remittance to ITR.
- Use the LRS limit and the Overseas Investment Rules 2022 to invest abroad through the right route
- Plan remittances so TCS is recovered in full and never becomes a permanent cost
- Compute tax on foreign shares, funds, dividends, RSUs, ESPPs and overseas property in INR
Understanding Wealth Tax Equivalent Structures and Compliance Globally
An advanced course for HNIs, business owners with complex income and family offices who hold or plan to hold wealth across borders. India abolished its wealth tax in 2015, but wealth is still taxed here through surcharge, disclosure schedules, deemed rent, gift rules, stamp duty and transaction taxes. Learn how those wealth tax equivalents work, then see how other countries tax wealth directly: annual net wealth taxes in Switzerland, Norway and Spain, narrow asset taxes in France and Italy, the Dutch deemed return model, and estate and inheritance taxes in the US, UK and Japan. Understand exit taxes, the global billionaire minimum tax debate and why wealth taxes succeed or fail. Finish with the compliance an Indian resident with foreign assets cannot skip: Schedule AL, Schedule FA, the Black Money Act, CRS and FATCA reporting, and LRS with TCS.
- Distinguish a tax on wealth from a tax on income and identify where Indian law taxes wealth indirectly
- Explain how India's Wealth Tax Act, 1957 worked, why it was abolished and what replaced it
- Compare annual net wealth taxes, narrow asset taxes, deemed return systems and death taxes across major jurisdictions
Forensic Accounting & Compliance
19 courses
Advanced AML Program Design for Financial Institutions
A concept course for chief compliance officers, senior forensic auditors and financial crime investigators who already know the basics of KYC and suspicious transaction reporting and now need to design the program itself. It treats an AML program as a system rather than a binder of policies: a risk assessment that drives every downstream decision, a governance model with clear accountability for the Designated Director and Principal Officer, customer due diligence that scales across digital onboarding, and a detection architecture of monitoring scenarios, screening and case management that is calibrated with data instead of vendor defaults. You work through the Indian architecture of the PMLA, the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules, FIU-IND and the RBI, SEBI and IRDAI requirements, what India's 2024 FATF mutual evaluation means for program design, and how to measure effectiveness, manage model risk, prepare for independent testing and learn from Indian enforcement actions. The course closes with the threats the next generation of programs must handle: mule account networks, virtual digital asset service providers and AI-driven monitoring.
- Diagnose why AML programs fail inspections even when every required policy exists
- Design an enterprise-wide ML and TF risk assessment and a customer risk rating model that actually drive controls
- Set clear accountability for the board, the Designated Director, the Principal Officer and the three lines of defence
Advanced Corporate Governance Failures: Board Level Complicity in Fraud
Most large Indian frauds were not hidden from the board. They were presented to it, minuted, and approved. This course studies board level failure as a spectrum, from passive oversight through wilful blindness to active collusion, and maps each stage to the liability tests in the Companies Act, 2013 and SEBI's LODR and PFUTP regulations. It works through Satyam, IL&FS, PMC Bank, Yes Bank, DHFL, ICICI Bank and Videocon, Fortis and Gensol Engineering from the boardroom's point of view, then builds the investigator's toolkit: forensic reading of board and committee minutes, director network mapping from MCA21 and exchange filings, resignation and auditor exit signals, and assembling a knowledge and consent evidence file. It closes with audit committee design and an escalation playbook for compliance officers when the board itself is the problem. Written for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Place a board's conduct on the complicity spectrum and match it to the legal liability test that applies
- Read the Satyam, IL&FS, PMC Bank, Yes Bank, DHFL, ICICI Videocon, Fortis and Gensol failures from inside the boardroom
- Analyse board and committee minutes, attendance and dissent records for evidence of knowledge or consent
Advanced Financial Statement Fraud Detection: Beneish M-Score and Altman Z-Score
A concept course on the Beneish M-Score and the Altman Z-Score for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators. Most practitioners can plug numbers into both formulas; far fewer can explain where the coefficients came from, why the cutoffs sit where they do, what error rates they carry, or why a company can pass one test and fail the other. This course goes underneath both models: Beneish's probit study of earnings manipulators, Altman's discriminant analysis of failed manufacturers, the economic story each variable tells, and how Ind AS and Schedule III reporting changes the inputs for NSE and BSE listed companies. You will then use the two scores together through a manipulation-distress matrix, see how fabricated profits push a Z-Score into the safe zone, work through Satyam and Ricoh India, learn where both models break (banks, NBFCs, holding companies, young companies) and how manipulators stay under the cutoffs, and finish by designing a screening and escalation programme whose evidence holds up before an audit committee.
- Explain how Beneish and Altman built their models, what each coefficient means and what the original studies did and did not prove
- Read every M-Score and Z-Score variable as an economic signal, not just a ratio
- Choose cutoffs and model variants deliberately, based on error costs and the type of company
Advanced Regulatory Investigation Processes: SFIO, ED, and CBI Roles Explained
A practitioner's guide to how financial crime is investigated in India. You learn the legal basis, powers and process of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office under the Companies Act 2013, the Directorate of Enforcement under PMLA, FEMA and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, and the Central Bureau of Investigation under the DSPE Act and the Prevention of Corruption Act. The course traces how a case reaches each agency, how predicate offences chain one agency's case into another's, and how SEBI, the Income Tax Department and the agencies run parallel proceedings on the same facts. Real Indian cases anchor every chapter: IL&FS, DHFL, ABG Shipyard, PNB and Nirav Modi, and Satyam. The course closes with a practitioner's playbook: responding to a summons or search, preserving documents, running an internal investigation alongside an agency probe, and making a forensic audit report stand up as evidence. Educational content only, not legal advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Map which agency investigates which offence and the statute that gives it power
- Explain how SFIO is assigned a case under Section 212 and what Section 447 fraud requires
- Follow an ED case from ECIR through attachment, adjudication, arrest and bail under PMLA
Advanced Techniques in Off Balance Sheet Fraud Detection
The most damaging Indian frauds of the last decade were not hidden in the revenue line. They sat outside the balance sheet: shell companies that were never consolidated, guarantees and letters of comfort that never reached the contingent liabilities note, supplier credit dressed up as trade payables, loans to promoter vehicles routed through inter-corporate deposits, and evergreening through structures built to look like investments. DHFL, IL&FS, Coffee Day, Fortis and the Essel group all ran through these channels. This advanced concept course is for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators who need to find what the financial statements deliberately leave out. It covers where Ind AS draws the consolidation and derecognition boundary and how that boundary is gamed, how to map a group's real perimeter using MCA21, AOC-1 and director networks, how to read guarantees, contingent liabilities and hidden debt in operating lines, how siphoning works through the periphery of a group, and how to prove it using implied interest tests, charge registers, credit rating rationales and network analysis, to an evidence standard that holds up under RBI and SEBI processes. Educational content only, not investment or legal advice.
- Why off balance sheet structures are the preferred hiding place for debt, losses and diverted cash in Indian promoter-led groups
- How Ind AS 110, Ind AS 109, Ind AS 116 and Ind AS 37 draw the accounting boundary, and the specific judgements fraudsters exploit to stay outside it
- How to map a group's true perimeter using MCA21 filings, Form AOC-1, director networks and shared addresses
Case Study: A Cross Border Shell Company Network Investigation
An advanced case study that follows one cross-border shell company investigation from the first red flag to the enforcement fallout. A composite NSE-listed mid-cap reports a growth story that its cash flows do not support. An auditor's qualification and a bank's cross-border alert open the file. You scope the mandate, then map the domestic shell layer through MCA21 filings, common directors, shared addresses and related party transactions, and build the first network graph. You trace the money out through bank statements, SWIFT messages, import advances and an overseas subsidiary in a free zone, and back in as FDI and opaque FPI holdings that supported the share price. You then work the foreign layer: secrecy jurisdictions, nominee structures, open-source registry research abroad, and the official channels for evidence from other countries. The case closes with the forensic report, the split of threads between ED, SEBI, SFIO, DRI and the Income Tax Department, the fallout for the listed company and its investors, asset tracing, the control failures at banks, auditors and boards, and a reusable investigator's playbook. The company, its people and its numbers are an illustrative composite built from patterns in public Indian cases; the laws, systems and procedures are real.
- Scope a cross-border shell network investigation with a clear mandate, hypotheses and an evidence plan
- Map a domestic shell layer from MCA21 filings, director and address overlaps, and related party disclosures into a network graph
- Reconstruct outbound and inbound fund flows from bank statements, SWIFT messages, import advance records and overseas investment filings
Case Study: Board Level Complicity in the Satyam Fraud Revisited
A forensic case study of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest IT services company, whose chairman confessed in January 2009 to a balance sheet inflated by more than ₹7,000 crore, most of it cash that did not exist. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators, it revisits the fraud through the record that emerged after 2009: the CBI chargesheets and the 2015 special court judgment, SEBI's orders, the SFIO findings and the SEC and PCAOB actions against the auditors. The focus is the board. You examine how a board of globally credentialed independent directors approved the Maytas related party acquisition in December 2008, what the audit committee did and did not ask about years of idle cash, how the statutory auditor relied on bank confirmations routed through management, and where the line runs between complicity, negligence and capture. The course traces the aftermath from government supersession and the Tech Mahindra rescue to the Companies Act 2013 reforms it triggered, and closes with a board complicity diagnostic you can apply to any listed Indian company using exchange filings, annual reports and Screener.in.
- Reconstruct how the Satyam fraud worked, from fabricated bank statements and fixed deposit receipts to fake invoices generated outside the normal billing system
- Analyse the 16 December 2008 Maytas board meeting and identify the questions independent directors failed to ask about a related party deal
- Distinguish complicity, negligence and capture when assessing the conduct of independent directors, the audit committee and the statutory auditor
Deep Dive into Financial Statement Fraud and Forensic Red Flags
A forensic course for investors who already read financial statements and now want to catch the ones that lie. Learn how Indian listed companies inflate revenue, hide expenses, fake cash, and dress up balance sheets, and how to detect it using annual report notes, auditor reports, BSE/NSE filings, screener.in data, and quantitative screens like the Beneish M-Score. Built on real Indian cases: Satyam, Manpasand Beverages, Brightcom, Gitanjali Gems, CG Power, DHFL, Ricoh India, and more.
- Why companies commit accounting fraud and where the pressure points sit in Indian promoter-led firms
- How revenue gets inflated through channel stuffing, round-tripping, and fake customers, and how to test it against receivables and cash
- How expenses get parked in the balance sheet through capitalisation, inventory games, and related party structures
Practice Drills: Calculating Altman Z-Score on a Distressed Company
A practice-first companion to Deep Dive into Financial Statement Fraud and Forensic Red Flags. You already know what the Altman Z-Score is; this course makes you calculate it properly on distressed Indian companies, where the textbook inputs rarely sit cleanly on the face of the balance sheet. Working from Ind AS annual reports on NSE and BSE, Screener.in exports and the notes to accounts, you will rebuild all five ratios by hand, strip securities premium out of retained earnings, catch current maturities of long-term debt hiding outside short-term borrowings, normalise EBIT for exceptional items, and price equity through pledges and circuit-filter collapses. You will then pick the right model for manufacturers, service companies and private subsidiaries, stress the score for lease liabilities, contingent liabilities and corporate guarantees, learn exactly where the Z-Score breaks (NBFCs, banks, holding companies, manipulated books) and finish by writing a defensible Z-Score memo. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators who need a distress score that survives cross-examination.
- Choose correctly between the original Z, Z-prime and Z-double-prime models and apply the right zone cut-offs to each
- Map Ind AS balance sheet and P&L line items to all five Altman ratios without the common Screener.in shortcuts that distort them
- Rebuild retained earnings, working capital and EBIT from the notes to accounts, net of securities premium, revaluation reserves, exceptional items and current debt maturities
Practice Drills: Calculating Beneish M-Score on a Real Company's Financials
A calculation-first drill course on the Beneish M-Score, built for forensic auditors, compliance heads and financial crime investigators who need a score they can defend in a review meeting, not one copied off a screener. You will pull two or more years of inputs from Ind AS annual reports filed on NSE and BSE, map Schedule III's by-nature statements to Beneish's US-style lines, compute all eight variables by hand and in a spreadsheet, and then run the full model across five years for a listed Indian company, a company that later collapsed, and a group where standalone and consolidated scores diverge. The final chapter is about judgement: decomposing which variable moved the score, recognising false positives from acquisitions, sector quirks and genuine high growth, and writing the forensic note that turns a number into an escalation decision.
- Extract every Beneish input from an Ind AS annual report and reconcile it to Screener data
- Map Schedule III by-nature expense lines to COGS and SG&A proxies and apply them consistently
- Compute DSRI, GMI, AQI, SGI, DEPI, SGAI, LVGI and TATA by hand and explain what moves each one
Practice Drills: Designing an AML Program Framework for a Mock Institution
A practice-first course built around one mock institution: a fictional mid-sized NBFC in the RBI Middle Layer that runs gold loans, MSME loans and digital personal loans through lending service providers, and has outgrown the AML program it started with. You play the newly hired Principal Officer and build its program from the ground up. First you map every obligation under the PMLA, the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules and the RBI KYC Directions into a requirements register. Then you run the institution-wide ML and TF risk assessment, build a customer risk rating model and assess new products and lending partners before launch. You define the Designated Director and Principal Officer mandates, draft the policy skeleton and the escalation paths, design due diligence tiers, beneficial ownership and PEP procedures and periodic KYC updation, and write the first transaction monitoring rule set, sanctions and UAPA Section 51A screening, the FIU-IND reporting calendar and the record retention design. The course closes with role-based training, the independent AML audit and program KPIs, a full AML Program Document for board approval and a response to an RBI inspection finding.
- Translate PMLA, the PML Rules and the RBI KYC Directions into a requirements register with an owner for every obligation
- Run an institution-wide ML and TF risk assessment and turn it into a working customer risk rating model
- Assess new products, digital channels and lending service providers for money laundering risk before launch
Practice Drills: Investigating a Simulated Trade Based Money Laundering Case
A practice-first course built around one simulated trade-based money laundering investigation. A bank's transaction monitoring flags the trade finance account of a fictional mid-size Indian exporter, and you run the investigation from that alert to the final report. Every lesson is a drill that produces a working paper: a document reconciliation across invoice, shipping bill, bill of lading and bank realisation; a unit price test against market benchmarks; a shipment verification; an EDPMS match of export proceeds; a counterparty network map across the UAE, Hong Kong and Singapore; a round-tripping trace; a GST export refund test; an evidence timeline; a quantification of the value moved through mispricing; interview notes; and a draft Suspicious Transaction Report for FIU-IND. Along the way you learn the five core TBML typologies, how the Indian trade and foreign exchange framework under FEMA, the RBI Master Directions and PMLA creates both the paper trail and the reporting duties, and where an investigator's judgement ends and a regulator's begins. The course closes with a second, shorter case you work end to end on your own. All companies, people and figures in the case are fictional. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Recognise the five core TBML typologies and the red flags each one leaves in trade documents
- Reconcile an invoice, shipping bill, bill of lading and bank realisation and isolate the breaks
- Test declared unit prices against market benchmarks and size the implied value transfer
Practice Drills: Spotting Forensic Red Flags in Financial Statements
A practice-first companion to Deep Dive into Financial Statement Fraud and Forensic Red Flags. You already know the theory of revenue games, capitalised costs, hidden debt and accrual manipulation; this course makes you find them yourself. Every lesson is a drill built on Indian filings: Screener.in data, annual reports and exchange disclosures on NSE and BSE, auditor reports and CARO remarks, and the notes to accounts where problems are usually disclosed in plain sight. You will rebuild ten-year forensic worksheets, reconcile profit to cash, test capitalisation and depreciation choices, dig out contingent liabilities and standalone versus consolidated gaps, compute the Beneish M-Score and Sloan accruals by hand, and finish with blind full-company drills that end in a position decision. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNI investors who want a repeatable forensic routine rather than a list of scandals.
- Build a ten-year forensic worksheet for any listed Indian company from Screener.in and BSE/NSE filings
- Test whether reported revenue and margins are confirmed by cash collections, input costs and peers
- Catch capitalised expenses, stuck CWIP, depreciation policy changes and deferred impairments
Practice Drills: Tracing a Layered Transaction Network on Sample Data
An advanced, practice-first course on tracing layered funds through a network of accounts, the work a forensic auditor or financial crime investigator does after the alert fires. You start with a fictional case file: a victim complaint, statements from several Indian banks, wallet and payment aggregator records, and KYC data. You resolve accounts into real-world entities, turn the ledger into an edge list, draw the network and use centrality and community detection to find hubs, brokers and collector accounts. You then follow the money hop by hop and allocate tainted funds using FIFO, LIFO, pro-rata and the lowest intermediate balance rule, and handle cash withdrawals, splits and dead ends. Further drills take the trace through wallets, trade invoices and cross-border remittances, and crypto exchanges. The course closes with an evidence-grade fund flow chart, a proceeds-of-crime and freeze schedule, a trace report for FIU-IND, law enforcement or the board, and a full end-to-end trace on a fresh dataset. Grounded in the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, FIU-IND reporting, RBI KYC Directions and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. All names, accounts and figures are fictional and for training only. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Resolve accounts across banks into real-world entities using PAN, mobile, device and address links
- Convert a raw transaction ledger into an edge list and a fund flow network graph
- Use centrality and community detection to find hubs, brokers, collectors and hidden clusters
Understanding Complex Layering and Trade Based Money Laundering
An advanced concept course on the layering stage of money laundering and on trade based money laundering (TBML). You learn why layering is the hardest stage to detect, the techniques used to build complex layering chains in India (shell companies, accommodation entries, mule accounts, securities market schemes, hawala and crypto), and the role professional enablers play. The course then breaks down TBML: over and under invoicing, multiple invoicing, phantom shipments, misdescribed goods and services invoicing, and how each maps onto India's trade finance and foreign exchange plumbing, GST invoicing and high-risk commodities such as gold and diamonds. Real Indian cases anchor the material. The final chapter covers detection: red flag indicators, unit price benchmarking, network analysis and building a defensible suspicious transaction report for FIU-IND. Educational content only, not legal advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Explain why layering is the hardest stage of money laundering to detect and what makes a layering scheme complex
- Recognise the main layering techniques used in India, from shell companies and accommodation entries to mule accounts and bogus LTCG schemes
- Break down the core TBML techniques and calculate the value moved by over and under invoicing
Understanding Cross Border Money Laundering Through Shell Structures
A concept course for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators who need to understand shell structures from the inside. It takes apart the corporate vehicles that launderers use, from shell and front companies to nominee directors, trusts and layered holding chains in conduit jurisdictions, and shows how money actually crosses India's border through round tripping on the FDI and overseas investment routes, trade mispricing, hawala and back-to-back credit arrangements. You then work through the Indian legal net of the PMLA, FEMA, the Black Money Act and the Benami law, the beneficial ownership and layering rules under the Companies Act, and what the government and SEBI shell company crackdowns revealed. The second half is investigative: mapping ownership chains with public data, tracing fund flows across jurisdictions, reading related party disclosures for red flags and obtaining evidence from abroad. It closes with Indian case files and the detection controls an institution needs against shell structure risk.
- Distinguish shell, shelf, front and conduit companies and explain why each appeals to launderers
- Map the placement, layering and integration stages onto specific offshore vehicles, trusts and holding chains
- Trace how illicit money crosses India's border through round tripping, trade mispricing, hawala and back-to-back credit
Understanding Cryptocurrency and Its Use in Money Laundering Schemes
A practitioner's guide to cryptocurrency as a money laundering channel, written for the Indian regulatory setting. You start with what an investigator must understand about blockchains, wallets, stablecoins and exchanges, then work through India's framework: virtual digital assets under PMLA since March 2023, FIU-IND registration for offshore and domestic exchanges, Section 115BBH tax and 1 percent TDS as an investigative trail, and FATF Recommendation 15 with the Travel Rule. The core of the course maps the laundering typologies in use today, from mixers, privacy coins and chain hopping to DeFi bridges, NFT wash trading, P2P mule networks and crypto-hawala rails. You then learn how blockchain tracing works, what analytics tools can and cannot prove, and how to spot crypto exposure in bank and exchange data. Indian cases anchor the theory: the ED's instant loan app probe, the GainBitcoin Ponzi and the 2024 WazirX hack. The course closes with an investigation and risk framework playbook. Educational content only, not legal or investment advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Read a blockchain transaction and explain what it does and does not reveal about the parties
- Explain how virtual digital asset service providers came under PMLA and what FIU-IND registration requires
- Use the VDA tax and TDS trail as a source of investigative evidence
Understanding Insolvency Fraud and Asset Stripping Before Bankruptcy
By the time a company is admitted into insolvency, the most valuable assets have often already left the building. Brands move to promoter entities, cash leaves as advances to suppliers that never deliver, the parent's debts get secured on the subsidiary's land, and friendly creditors appear on the claims list. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code gives resolution professionals and lenders the tools to reverse this: preferential, undervalued, fraudulent and extortionate transactions under Sections 43 to 51, and personal liability for fraudulent and wrongful trading under Section 66. This advanced concept course is for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators. It covers the asset stripping playbook used in Indian promoter-led groups, the legal tests and look-back periods for each avoidance transaction, how the CoC process itself gets manipulated, how a forensic transaction audit is scoped and run under the CIRP Regulations, and what happens to avoidance recoveries and parallel ED, CBI and SFIO proceedings after a resolution plan is approved, with Jaypee Infratech, DHFL, Bhushan Power and Steel and other Indian cases throughout. Educational content only, not investment or legal advice.
- Why the months before insolvency are when value is most often stripped from a company, and the warning signs that show up in filings first
- How to distinguish preferential, undervalued, fraudulent and extortionate transactions under Sections 43, 45, 49 and 50 of the IBC, including look-back periods and defences
- The asset stripping playbook in Indian promoter groups: slump sales, brand and IP transfers, supplier advances, inter-corporate deposits and collateral shifting
Understanding International Cooperation in Financial Crime Investigation
Financial crime crosses borders in seconds. Investigations cross them in years. This course explains the machinery that closes that gap: mutual legal assistance treaties, letters rogatory, FIU-to-FIU exchange through the Egmont Group, SEBI's use of the IOSCO multilateral MoU, tax information exchange under DTAAs, CRS and FATCA, Interpol notices, extradition and cross-border asset recovery. You learn who India's central authorities are, how a request is drafted and routed, why requests stall on dual criminality, specialty and foreign data protection rules, and how foreign evidence is made admissible in an Indian court. Real cases anchor every chapter: the HSBC Geneva list, the Panama and Pandora Papers, Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and 1MDB. The course closes with the practitioner's side: building a cross-border evidence pack that agencies can actually use and handling foreign requests that land on an Indian institution. Educational content only, not legal advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Explain why sovereignty creates an evidence gap and which treaties and standards bridge it
- Identify India's central authorities for MLA, extradition, FIU exchange, securities and tax requests
- Follow an MLAT request and a letter rogatory from drafting to execution abroad