Dear Members,
Somehow I feel, the thread has lost relevance having been clouded by personal biases and misconstrued facts. I would like to take this opportunity to address some of those issues with the hope that meaningful dialogue may continue going forward.
First is the issue of the league being backed by Kapil Dev, and there are some who consider this to be a failed venture similar to his earlier dealing with ICL. ICL, in my opinion was not a failure. It was an innovative concept based along similar lines of T20 already existing in England at the time. It had such immense market potential in India that it took considerable lobbying to deny ICL the kind of players that would have made it big like the IPL is today. So it was not Kapil Dev's short coming that led to its demise.
Next is the issue of the current ITL being a cheap copy of Zerodha 60-day challenge. Let's all be open minded and try to understand that Zerodha did have first mover advantage in the field of discount broking. Discount broking might appear to be an innovation by Zerodha, but has been in existence in the developed markets like US and Europe since early 2000s. Samco has recently entered the fray, and just like any new business, you need sound marketing and strategy to garner market share from existing providers. Therefore, what Samco is doing through this competition is no fraud scheme, it's simply marketing.
Lastly, the fear of traders losing their accounts and it being akin to gambling is baseless. If you don't trade with sound principles, it wouldn't matter where you trade, you'd still lose money.
That such competitions don't last long would be incorrect, for this concept is similar to the World Cup Trading Championship which is currently into its 32nd year. So my point is, when T20 got adopted in India in a big way, discount broking gave advantage to the small retail investor, why would this league, which is based on a successful model not be successful here?
Definitely, we can argue about the brokerage plans of Samco and the features of its trading platform and customer service vis-a-vis other providers. But as far as the league itself is concerned, I believe it is a great opportunity to put skills to the test.
Disclosure: I have taken part in this league solely for the purpose of understanding where my trading stands compared to others. This despite the fact, that I had a cheaper brokerage plan with my previous broker.