Stock Pathshala Review: Is it just an Over-Glorified Stock Tips Website?

Bas 12th pass kar lo, phir to aish hai… Bas graduation kar lo, phir to aish hai! Following these lines has led to a massive group of people in my peer range possessing " essential " degrees (more like popular, but that is a different argument).

Now you would think that degrees would mean that these peers have the promised aish, except the aish is just ashes and lies. These degree holders know a whole lot of nothing except textbook jargon to sound cool. Throw them in the deep waters of the actual industry, and they know a whole lot of nothing.

Sure, an argument can be made that they learn from industrial exposure, but the degree is not much help there.

So, while institutional education has reduced itself to not much more than a capitalist ploy meant to sap funds from scared masses, knowledge is still an important pursuit in life. Of course, knowledge can be sought and attained through other means, too, like the various platforms available throughout the internet.

According to a report by India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), around 26% of the Indian population is under the age of 14 years, making a significant part of the country’s population open to adapting to a new and improved form of education. This new form, of course, is EdTech platforms that are making education far more accessible and tailor-made to the students than just a curriculum.

As a result of this potential for growing adaptation, the EdTech industry is projected to grow to a massive $10 billion system by 2025, as per the report by IBEF.

The subject of today’s article is Stock Pathshala, a player in the EdTech industry, looking to capitalise on this growing need for an alternative to traditional education.

About Stock Pathshala

Stock Pathshala was founded in 2016 by Aseem Juneja, along with the YouTube channel, A Digital Blogger. Although Stock Pathshala has a dedicated YouTube channel too, A Digital Blogger has a bigger subscriber base due to its longer existence. The Stock Pathshala website, as the name suggests, is a platform that teaches various aspects of the financial markets. The content on the platform is more centred around trading than investing, with a minor focus on ratio and fundamental analysis.

The Stock Pathshala platform has 70 courses curated by 40 industry experts. The website is more of an advertisement location with no access to the courses/content offered by the platform. To be able to access the courses, users need to download the app. The app opens up the users to the possibility of exploring free and paid content. The pricing for Stock Pathshala will be discussed next.

Stock Pathshala Pricing

The Stock Pathshala platform does not have a single pricing plan. The website shows the following four pricing plans:

1. Free: The Free plan gives logged-in users access to “all the free content” on the platform on the website. The free content includes a summary of existing courses and basic information about the various topics and chapters within.

This is a lifetime duration plan.

2. Beginner: This plan charges ₹999 for a duration of a month. This plan provides users access to video courses, textual courses and podcasts. The plan gives users “unlimited access” which means that they can use the unlocked content as many times as they want during the course of the month.

3. Star: For ₹6,999, users can access all of the features mentioned above for a period of a year. The “Star” plan has no additional features on top of the “Beginner” plan, except the per month cost is reduced.

So the Star plan is more of a money-grab attempt than an additional plan.

4. Legend: The “Legend” plan costs ₹7,499, but the only legendary thing about the plan is the “Personalised assistance throughout your trading journey”. The ten-year duration of the course seems pretty excessive, in all honesty. I mean, even integrated courses take half of that time, and the outcome is an “Oh-so-valuable” degree!

Also, I hope “personalised assistance” means something other than buy and sell recommendations, or Stock Pathshala may be in for a bitter lesson in compliance.

On an educational Quest

While Stock Pathshala has its perks, the pricing can be a bit unnecessarily high. To top it off, the skill taught on the platform is only usable as far as the lessons on financial topics are concerned.

The majority of the chapters focus on trading, which in all honesty, does not really need any skill, as “forecasting” is not really an aspect that can be trained in a person and since the chapters focus on something that cannot quite be learned, how about spending your hard-earned money on something relatively real?

Quest by Finology has courses that range from beginner-friendly topics like “Analysis of Financial Statements” to advanced topics such as “Basics of Technical Analysis”. What’s more, is that these courses also feature various industry experts that add to the financial education that you receive.

The “Treasures of Quest” do not just end there, by the way. The courses on Finology Quest are a part of the Finology One subscription. So, for a monthly price of just ₹999 or an annual fee of ₹5,994, you get the financial education that this entire country needs, along with access to tools like stock screeners, financial planning, journalism, and so much more.

Don’t believe me? Head on over to Quest by Finology to fact-check my claims!

The Bottom Line

This was not just another sales article meant to bash a competitor to our basket of products. The platform in question offers training in a subject that has no innate skill. In the past, we have reviewed other competitors who did not deal with the brunt of the criticism.

For example, Zerodha Varsity, another competitor to Quest, faired pretty well with flying colours, owing to its offering.

As an end-all, be-all, had Stock Pathshala better, or rather, more valuable content, the platform showed a lot of promise, owing to the notoriety that its founder has on YouTube. As it stands, however, the platform, in my opinion, is just a teched-up “Telegram tips” equivalent.

Until next time!