The real product is you

Summary: A broker who wouldn't deactivate F&O. A ULIP that trapped him for five years. An NBFC that steered depositors toward the weakest products. Readers didn't push back on the column about incentives. They wrote in to say: this happened to me.

Dhirendra Kumar's latest Editor’s Note, ‘When incentives work against investors’, didn't just offer advice. It also offered something sharper: a lens. If you want to understand why a financial problem persists, he wrote, don't ask why investors aren't better informed. Ask who is making money from the problem continuing. 

The responses that came back showed that for many readers, this wasn't a theory. It was a biography.

The ones who lost and know exactly why

The most striking responses were from readers who had lived the incentive trap in real time and could name it with precision only in retrospect.

Subhankar Das wrote with unusual candour about his journey into futures and options. He was drawn in initially by his broker, then by his own conviction – "Why can't I win in option buying? I too can win." Early profits felt like skill. Then the losses came. He repeatedly asked his broker to deactivate the F&O section from his trading app. The broker never complied. "The broker was earning commission at my expense," he writes, "not only financial loss, but mental and psychological loss as well." He eventually lost close to half a million rupees before SEBI's own findings about retail F&O losses reached him. His closing note is quietly determined: he believes disciplined SIP investing can help him recoup, and he is treating the whole episode as a lesson. It is the kind of lesson that costs more than any course.

Abhijit Lahiri's encounter was with ULIPs. He realised mid-policy, around 2015, that something was wrong, but by then he was trapped. Surrendering early would have crystallised a large loss, so he stayed in until the five-year lock-in passed, then cancelled permanently. He asks a fair question: haven't ULIPs improved since IRDA tightened the rules? The answer, as the column implies, is that better regulation helped, but the fundamental commission asymmetry between term insurance and investment-linked products still shapes what gets sold.

Swaminathan Ramachandran lost money to ULIP upfront charges as well, and his letter carries a harder edge. On F&O, he puts the question bluntly: "If futures and options are a sure way to make a loss for individuals, why should they be allowed at all?" It's a question the column doesn't quite answer and perhaps deliberately so.

The ones who saw it from the other side

Pawan Jajodia brought a perspective that few readers can offer: he spent four years in the 1990s doing deposit mobilisation for an NBFC, right in the machinery the column describes. He watched it operate from the inside. The pattern he witnessed was precise: companies with weaker financial health offered higher commissions, which meant brokers steered depositors toward exactly the products most likely to fail them. "Results were evident," he writes. "More depositors got duped."

He also asks a question: why wasn't the government included as a beneficiary of the system? Stamp duty, STT, the layers of tax on market transactions – these too are revenues extracted from investor activity, with no particular value added in return. It's a sharp observation, and one that the column's framework applies to cleanly.

The ones who recognised the principle

Several readers wrote in not with personal stories but with the quiet satisfaction of having a pattern they'd long sensed finally named clearly.

Dharam Chand highlighted the column's central line, "If you want to understand why a problem persists, ask who profits from it rather than who suffers from it", and called it out-of-the-box thinking that should agitate every retail investor into examining their own decisions more carefully.

Tridivesh Gupta took the framework and applied it practically: if commission is the root cause of F&O mis-selling, the fix is either shorter trading hours or lower commissions. The logic follows directly from the column's own argument about how SEBI's mutual fund commission reform actually worked.

And Anvi Mehta, who describes herself as someone who almost never writes reviews or shares opinions, made an exception. Her note was less about the column's argument and more about the person making it—someone who, in her observation, has consistently chosen not to profit from the problems he writes about. That, in the context of a column entirely about incentive structures, is perhaps its own kind of endorsement.

The inbox after this column had a different quality from most. Less debate, more recognition. Reader after reader wrote not to push back but to say: yes, this happened to me, and now I understand why. The column gave them a vocabulary for something they had experienced but not quite been able to name.

That, in its own way, is what independent financial education is for.

Credits

Subhankar Das • Abhijit Lahiri • Swaminathan Ramachandran • Pawan Jajodia • Dharam Chand • Tridivesh Gupta • Anvi Mehta

This story came from readers who hit reply on the Editor's Note. The next one will be on its way to your inbox this Saturday. We're reading every response.

Also read: The crash is the course

This article was originally published on April 21, 2026.