YouTube stars and broking apps lure pandemic-hit day traders in India

Around 10 million new investing accounts, largely by retail investors, were opened in India last year, calculations from the country's two main depositories of accounts show

In November, when India was in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, one of the country’s top YouTube financial “influencers” was met with an unusually large barrage of requests on his trip home.

“My friends kept asking me how they could invest in mutual funds or equities -- even a driver of an auto rickshaw asked me how he could set up a mutual fund with 500 rupees ($7) a month,” Prasad Lendwe told Bloomberg News of his trip from Hyderabad to Malkapur, a 300,000-strong city 480 kilometers northeast of Mumbai.

“When I started my YouTube platform, no one was