VMPL

New Delhi [India], August 27: In India's finance content boom, everyone is chasing the same things: more views, more followers, more reach. Pranjal Rastogi and CA Harshitha Iyer had them. Their YouTube channel, Capturn, had crossed one lakh subscribers.

They shut it down anyway.

'The views were there, the money was there,' Rastogi says. 'But if you asked us, is the average person watching us actually trading better six months later, we couldn't say yes. Short form content gives the illusion of knowledge. The real skills a trader needs to multiply his money cannot be taught through hook-the-viewer-till-the-end kind of content.'

Today the two run Smart Money Club, a SEBI-registered research analyst firm in Surat. Getting there meant walking away from an audience most creators spend years chasing, and rebuilding from zero under a regulator's watch.

Two founders, opposite roadsRastogi studied financial markets at Narsee Monjee in Mumbai. Most of his batch took the expected route. Placements, corporate jobs, the usual. He went home and started trading. He has done it full time for seven years now.

The first stretch was rough. 'I lost money in ways that were completely avoidable if someone had just told me what not to do. Nobody did.'

So he started chasing the questions that would take years: what system, where to enter, where the stop-loss sits, how to trail it, when to exit. Each sounds simple. None is.

Iyer's path ran the other way. She cleared the CA course in her first attempt: All India Rank 50 in Foundation, All India Rank 33 in Intermediate. The conventional route was obvious. Instead, she runs the financial and compliance side of a market education business.

'I have seen countless people around me losing money in the markets. The problem isn't that they don't have enough knowledge. It's quite the opposite. They have too much of it, from too many places and none of it fits together. And when they lose, this industry tells them the problem is discipline. A you problem. It usually isn't.'

What one lakh subscribers taught themCapturn began simply: Rastogi and Iyer publishing what they were learning about the markets. Then the audience grew, eventually past 100,000 subscribers.

But the more traders they spoke to, the clearer the gap became. Most did not need another strategy, indicator or market opinion. They already had plenty. What they lacked was a way to connect everything into a repeatable process: what to trade, when to enter, when not to trade at all, how much to risk, where to place the stop-loss, when to add, how to manage a position as it moves, and ultimately when to sell.

Capturn had proved they could attract an audience. It had also convinced them that attracting one was not enough.

So they shut the channel down and started again.

Building Smart Money Club from scratchThey went back to the work of Stan Weinstein, Mark Minervini and William O'Neil and tested those ideas against Indian conditions: different liquidity, circuit limits, stock behaviour and market cycles. The aim was to learn what held up here rather than to reproduce an American playbook. The patterns that survived became the framework Smart Money Club would teach.

They built the curriculum first, focused on swing and positional trading for people who wanted to be in the markets without watching a screen all day. They deliberately avoided intraday and futures and options, styles that often demand faster decisions, closer monitoring and far more screen time. The idea was simple: trading should fit around a job or a business, not take over it.

At the centre of the programme is the Inner Circle Call, a weekly session where members work through market conditions, sectors, stocks, setups and risk with the same framework. It has run every week from the start, including weeks when there was little worth doing.

Screening follows the same logic: members begin with the broader market and narrow thousands of listed companies using relative strength, liquidity, price and volume behaviour, market structure and defined setups, until the market is small enough to work with systematically.

Once the system was in place, a new problem showed up. Members could learn the process, but following it meant four platforms: one for screening, another for market breadth, another for sectors, another for charts. Too many moving parts for a system meant to make trading simpler.

So the founders built the missing piece themselves. Rastogi had never coded before. He learned while building ProScreener, using AI tools to understand the code and keep adding what the system needed. It put screening, market breadth, sector analysis and the rest of the process in one place, designed around how members are taught to trade.

From education business to regulated firmThe next step was registering as a SEBI Research Analyst, with qualification, financial and documentation requirements and an ongoing compliance framework that did not exist when they were running a YouTube channel. In June 2026, their entity Wealth Vidhya, operating as Smart Money Club, received registration INH000028352.

'People asked why we went through the registration process at all,' Rastogi says. 'For us, it was about accountability. If we're putting research out there and people are acting on it, there should be a framework we are answerable to. That felt like the right way to build this business.'

Choosing the slower roadRegistration changed the business: clearer boundaries around what they could say, and responsibility attached to anything they put out publicly. For the founders, that was the direction they wanted.

Capturn began by adding more market content to the internet. Smart Money Club is largely about helping traders filter most of it out.

The audience came first. The business they wanted to build took longer.

Investments in securities markets are subject to market risks. Smart Money Club is a SEBI-registered Research Analyst (Registration No. INH000028352). Registration granted by SEBI does not guarantee performance or assure returns.

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