Fellow Traders and Investors,

All these advertisements by Kapil Dev for Indian trading league spawned my curiosity. I gave them a call which ended at Samco securities, the execution broker for Indian trading league. That is when I realized that this entire initiative is by Samco and Kapil Dev has invested into Samco.

We have already added Samco on our list of 70+ brokers where you can see everything from financials to hidden charges to everything else. Click on this link to check the review about Samco.

Samco seems to have been inspired by Zerodha, not just in terms of their pricing model, but also the Indian trading league being an extension of the Zerodha’s 60 day challenge. They have also gone one step ahead seemingly infringing the copyright violations by copy pasting a few of the pages from Zerodha whose website has been live for the last 4 + years. A couple of examples are given below:

Zerodha.com

Samco.in

Note that even the savings number shown by default matches Zerodha

Zerodha.com

Samco.in

My verdict on Samco, and should you start a relationship with them? 

1. Samco is erstwhile Samruddhi Securities, and this is their rebranded initiative. The financials of the company even after being in business for a very long time is quite ordinary. If you visit the link on comparebrokerages for Samco, you will see that profits are less than Rs 10lks/year for the last 3 years. The entire balance sheet size for last year (equity and commodity business together) is only around Rs 15 crores, which is the least among all the discount brokers out there. So the question arises if all these prizes – especially Rs 1 crore for the winning trader is actually for real, or just a marketing gimmick to get leads. Yes, they have a new investor in the business, but the question still arises on why would someone invest in a business like this which has quite a bad track record.

2. When this news article was released by ET on May 6th, the website Indiantradingleague.com by mistake was open for public for a few minutes. I guess they realized the folly and shut it down within 5 mins. I was one of the lucky few to have checked out what it was all about even before the launch. They were running a marketing blitz under #eknayileague to give away Rs 1lk to whoever could guess what it was all about. Since I knew what it was, entered into the contest just to see if I am able to win anything( atleast meet Kapil Dev if not for the cash prize). My submission was not even acknowledged forget any prize, the only thing I got from them were spam emails  asking me to open an account with Samco the last two days.

Considering that there are not many reviews available on the trading platform and considering that they seem to be blowing this prize money out of proportion, I think it is best to avoid. Smells a little like the “Hometrade scam” back in 2002 when cricketers and actors started advertising for Hometrade which eventually collapsed and caused losses of over Rs 600 crores to the investors. 

If you are looking at discount brokers, I’d advise you to choose between Zerodha or RKSV. 

Empowering Indian retail investors/traders,

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