Over the last year, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has taken a tough stand against financial influencers or the so-called finfluencers and cracked down on several of them. The biggest issue the regulator has had is around misleading and unqualified advice provided by these finfluencers.
Last year, SEBI had issued restrictions for finfluencers providing stock tips on social media under the guise of investor education. Now, the market regulator has proposed new rules on how price data of stock exchanges is shared and used in a bid to curb its misuse.
Back in 2024, SEBI had prohibited the stock exchanges from sharing the real-time price data with third parties. It had restricted the sharing of the live data by exchanges only for trading and its related activities. It had prescribed a one-day time lag for educational and awareness activities.
Later, norms were tightened, and SEBI stipulated that entities that only engaged in education could use the data with a three-month lag. Now, through a consultation paper, SEBI has proposed a time lag of 30 days for both sharing and usage of price data. This, it said, would serve the purpose of protecting against misuse of exchange data as well as keeping the education content relevant. The worry has been that the live data, even with a one-day lag, could be misused by people claiming to be educators, but perhaps running unregistered investment advisories.
“One of the essential elements distinguishing investor education from advice/ recommendation is the market data based on which educational content is being developed. Using live data for educational purposes is clearly outside the scope of pure educational activity as it involves analysing current data to predict future prices, which falls under the definition of Investment Advisory/ Research Analyst activity,” SEBI noted.
It said that it had received comments from stakeholders that the one-day time lag was too short and that there were possible cases of misuse of one-day time lag data, building a case for increasing the time lag to a larger period.
In December 2025, the regulator had cracked down on stock market trainer Avadhut Sathe and ordered the impounding of unlawful gains of over Rs 546 crore, which the firm had earned over the past several years from alleged investment advisory and research analyst services.
SEBI, in its order, had noted that none of the noticees, including Avadhut Sathe Trading Academy, Avadhut Sathe and Gouri Sathe, were registered with SEBI as investment advisors or research analysts, and despite that, they had been providing investment advisory and research analyst services under the guise of stock market training programmes to a large number of investors.
The noticees had also continued to disseminate misleading information to the public for inducing investors by portraying unrealistic returns from the stock market, despite being warned by SEBI to avoid recurrence of such instances in future.
SEBI has also taken action against several other financial influencers. It had begun proceedings last month to recover dues in crores from finfluencer Mohammad Nasiruddin Ansari, popular as Baap of Chart and Golden Syndicate Ventures.
