This derivatives trader chose financial education over brokerage business

The man who hates seeing people losing money started Kredent InfoEdge, whose two platforms offer video courses on investing and a base for learners to dive into stock fundamentals and technicals

Vivek Bajaj had all the ingredients to launch a successful brokerage–fancy management degree, a decade of commodities trading experience and being born into a Marwadi family. But he took up the crusade of imparting financial market education to one and all instead.

“I have been a trader for 15 years, never a broker. I have a problem: if I see people lose money, I feel bad. As a broker, you will see 90 per cent of your customers lose money,” Bajaj tells me over the phone. Some six years ago, he decided he’d rather use his experience to create an impact by setting up a learning company.

Bajaj is the co-founder of Kolkata-based financial group Kredent InfoEdge Pvt Ltd which houses Elearnmarkets and StockEdge. Started in 2015, Elearnmarkets offers video courses on stock market investing and strategies covering equity, commodity and currency markets. As an extension to this business, StockEdge was launched to provide a research platform for learners to deep dive into stock fundamentals and technicals.

The two platforms are subscribed by two million learners. Last month, Kredent raised its first institutional investment from Kotak Securities which invested Rs10 crore as a strategic investor. Kredent will add a link to Kotak’s trading platform and Kotak customers will get native access to Kredent’s content as part of the planned integration, Bajaj said.

After cutting his teeth in commodity derivatives trading at JM Financials in Mumbai, Bajaj returned to Kolkata to setup his own business. He created Kredent Trading Desk to service professional institutional derivatives traders. Simultaneously, he also started teaching offline and online classes under Kredent Academy banner somewhere in 2008.

During the past 10 years, India has seen a boom in financial services. Dozens of digital-first wealth firms like Zerodha, Groww, Kuvera, Paytm Money have come up to target first-time users and a growing middle class. Most of these, if not all, have their own content and learning units–something that is fast becoming a massive financial content engine.

Various estimates peg financial participants at 70 million (in India) and the figure is growing steadily.

“When I started financial education in 2008, it was only a hobby. I did it as a not-for-profit (business) for five years,” says Bajaj. “It took me five to six years of teaching without the idea of generating money before making it into a business for profits. Education business cannot be run with pure profit intention.”

For Bajaj, it is a passion. He is also a noted financial market guru on social media–his personal accounts have over 300,000 followers on YouTube and 170,000 followers on Twitter. The content that goes into Elearnmarkets and StockEdge is contributed by consultants–about 200 have contributed to building it up–and gets completely refreshed every three years.

The next step for his business is adding the element of ‘social’. “StockEdge will add tools allowing the users to share their research, discuss and collaborate with other users on the platform itself,” says Bajaj.