5-Day Financial Education Programme for Youth Citizens’
VVM’s Shree Damodar College of Commerce & Economics in association with NISM and Kotak Securities organized a ‘5- Day Financial Education Programme for Young Citizens’, from 25th to 30th January 2022 from 03:00 to 5:00 pm via Google Meet platform. 50 students of B.Com, BBA (FS) & M.Com participated in the program. The Resource Persons for the program were Dr. Sarika Lohana, SEBI & NISM Empaneled Certified Trainer in Securities Market and Dr. Anita Saini, SEBI & NISM Empaneled Certified Trainer in Securities Market
Dr. Sarika Lohana welcomed all the participants and briefed the students about the programme namely – “Kona Kona Shiksha Programme” which is a Kotak Securities CSR Initiative. She emphasized that this course will give the students deep insights about securities market and will enhance the financial literacy. She further introduced the speaker of the session Dr. Anita Saini who is SEBI & NISM Empaneled Certified Trainer in Securities Market. The speaker further said NISM – National Institute of Securities Market is an educational initiative by SEBI, which aims at creating awareness of personal finance framework, employment opportunities, empowering students to answer interviews confidently. She mentioned that only 2% of the Indian population is investing in mutual funds.
The speaker began with the 1st Session – Importance of Investment. The concept of Impulsive Spending was explained with an interesting example. Dr. Anita Saini gave an interesting solution to beat inflation i.e. to invest some portion of your saving in Financial Products. The popular asset classes like Equity, Fixed Deposits, Gold and Property were explained in detail.
Dr. Saini then commenced with Session 2- Financial Investment Opportunities, here various types of asset classes like cash, equity, fixed income, real estate, and commodities were explained and compared with each other. And lastly the speaker discussed about Small Saving Schemes like PPF, Sukanya Samriddhi Scheme and various Fixed Deposits namely Bank FD, Post Office FD and company FD.
The session on day 2 started with a strength of 45 participants. The Resource Person Dr. Sarika Lohana began with a brief introduction on mutual funds. She explained ways in which one can invest in gold without investing in physical gold like Gold ETFs in the form of Gold Mutual Funds and Sovereign Gold Bonds. Next, she explained the requirements one needs to adhere to when directly investing in Equity. The process and prerequisites to invest in securities market were covered. She explained the three accounts that are required to register in the security market namely, a bank account, trading account with a broker and Demat account with a depository participant.
On Day- 3 the Resource Person Dr Sarika Lohana started with the introduction of Primary market. She explained, how a company raise funds from all investors, usually for new projects, expansion and repayment of debts. She also spoke on the Initial public Offerings (IPO) and its requirements. Price Discovery of share in public offering, the fixed price method and the book building method was covered in detail. She also elaborated on how one can invest in secondary market and what is the due diligence to be kept in mind while investing in secondary market.
Dr. Anita Saini started the Day-4 session by explaining how to place an order for investment, by personally visiting the broker’s office, through email along with the steps involved therein or via online websites or apps. Further, she spoke about the market watch section on online websites and as certain the important information contained in the section like last traded price and percentage change. The Resource Person also informed the participants about the various types of investment orders that an investor can place such as limit order, market order, after market order, immediate order, stop loss order, cover order and bracket order. She also went on to highlight certain key trading terminal features like, the login process, access to market watch list , creating a customized watch list , placing of buy or sell order, access to trade book , access to order book and seamless fund transfer.
The Resource Person for the session on Day-5 was Dr, Sarika Lohana, who briefed the students about the key points to know about investing. She stated that investing without analysis is like driving on a highway blind folded. Later she began with the concept of Mutual Funds. She went on to explain why investing in Mutual funds is better than investing in direct shares/ equity investments. She stated that in mutual funds the fund manager and their research team choose the shares for us. Whereas in direct share you have to carefully, choose the right share at the righ price. Adding to this the Resource Person stated that tax benefit under section 80C cannot be availed in direct shares whereas in mutual funds tax benefit can be availed.
The sessions conducted by Dr. Sarika Lohana and Anita Saini were very informative, interactive and it was a great success. At the end of the session, a quiz was sent to all the students via email in order to receive the rank and the certificate. The session ended with a Vote of Thanks proposed by Ms. Abigale Rodrigues, Asst Prof in Commerce. The Teachers In-charge for this program were Ms. Preksha Chopdekar, Ms. Swati Bhat, Ms. Lizia Gomes and Ms. Abigale Rodrigues.