About

The analyst, the method, and what we earn from

Q: Is Potoos a Research Analyst or an Investment Adviser?

A Research Analyst, registration INH000027380. A Research Analyst publishes research and recommendations on securities. An Investment Adviser advises you on your own portfolio and circumstances under a separate SEBI registration beginning with INA. Potoos does not do the second.

Q: Does a stock advisory need access to my demat account?

Potoos never needs it. Calls arrive with an entry, a target and a stop-loss, and you place the order yourself in your own account with your own broker. No login, no password, no account linking. Treat a request for your trading credentials as a reason to stop, whoever is asking.

Q: What is the minimum capital to subscribe to Potoos?

Rs 50,000. Below that Potoos would rather you did not subscribe yet, because a normal run of stop-losses can leave you without the capital to keep following the plan.

Q: Can I cancel a subscription and get a refund?

Yes. You can cancel at any point in the term. The amount used to the date of the request is deducted on a pro rata basis and the balance is refunded to the account you paid from.

Q: How is a Potoos call made?

On most days a stock or index trades inside a range. If that range runs from 0 to 100, the aim is to enter around 20 and exit around 80, deliberately not trying to catch the low or the high. The small-capital plan works mostly from price action and option greeks. The order of priority is preserve capital, keep losses controlled, then take profit. Calls go out the evening before the market opens, each with an entry, a target and a stop-loss.

Vinoth Kumar S runs Potoos. Here is the registration, how a call is built, where the money comes from, and the kind of subscriber we turn away.

Published 23 September 2026 · Potoos Research Services

The short answer. Potoos Research Services is run by Vinoth Kumar S, a SEBI-registered Research Analyst, INH000027380, from a desk in Chennai. We publish stock and index option calls, each with an entry, a target and a stop-loss, in the app, the evening before the market opens. Subscription fees are the only money we take: no brokerage share, no distribution commission, no payment from any company whose stock we cover. And if you have less than ₹50,000 of trading capital, we would rather you did not subscribe yet. The reason is further down this page.

Vinoth Kumar S

Proprietor and Research Analyst, Potoos Research Services

SEBI RA · INH000027380

The facts you can check

Name on the SEBI register: Vinoth Kumar S
Research Analyst registration: INH000027380
Registration granted: May 2026, perpetual, subject to continued compliance
BSE enlistment: 7210
Qualifications: MBA, and NISM Research Analyst certification
In the market since: 2005
Research desk: Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Compliance officer: Vinoth Kumar S

Do not take our word for any of it

Open SEBI's public register of Research Analysts, search INH000027380, and check that the name and the city on SEBI's record match this page. A Research Analyst number starts with INH. If you were shown a number starting with INA, that is an Investment Adviser, which is a different registration with different permissions. The full four-step check is here, and it is written so you can run it on us first.

Why Potoos exists

The first investment happened in 2005, out of a first salary. For years after that it was ordinary private investing: a few stocks, some options, mutual funds, alongside a career spent building products and startups. The pandemic was the first stretch of time long enough to study the market properly.

What that study turned up was not a secret. It was that a small investor looking for help had two options, and both were bad. Most of what was on offer came from people with no licence at all. The licensed voices that did answer tended to say some version of the same thing: if your capital is small, this is not the place for you.

The stock market is open to everyone. What a small investor is missing is not the right to participate. It is the right tools and the right information.

There is a real error underneath the dismissal, and it is worth naming, because it is the error most retail investors make on their own. A strategy built for ₹1 crore of capital cannot be run on ₹1 lakh. Same approach, different capital, entirely different experience. Wanting ₹1 lakh to behave like ₹10 lakh is where most of the damage starts.

From watching retail investors closely, two patterns repeat. There are people who teach themselves and then change strategy every few weeks, so nothing is ever tested. And there are people who take recommendations, usually from unlicensed sources, and then do not follow the plan that came with them.

Both run into the same wall, which nobody sells a course on: execution. A recommendation is a piece of information. Placing the order is the actual skill, and the market's plumbing, supply and demand, order types, latency, is invisible to most people who are risking money in it. We have watched people who could not place a basic order confidently. That is the gap Potoos was built for, and it is deliberately the bottom of the pyramid. Anyone with large capital and good information already has plenty of options.

The part of this story we would rather tell you ourselves

In 2023 the first application for a SEBI Research Analyst licence was rejected, on the ground that the applicant was not from a finance background. That was a fair reading of the paperwork at the time. The work continued, the application went in again with more experience and a clearer case behind it, and the registration was granted in May 2026. We would rather you heard that from us than found it out later.

How a call is built

Start with the constraint, because it shapes everything else. Almost every subscriber has a job or a business. Nobody with ₹50,000 to ₹5,00,000 in the market should be spending a working day watching a screen for it. So the method has to fit into a few minutes, in the evening.

On most days, a stock or an index trades inside a range. Some days it breaks out, but most days it does not. If you think of that range as running from 0 to 100, the aim is to enter around 20 and leave around 80. We deliberately do not try to catch the low or the high. Giving up both ends is the price of staying in the part of the move that is easiest to hold.

There are many public ways to draw a range: Bollinger bands, average true range, Fibonacci, Gann, Darvas. We use our own, and the small-capital plan works mostly from price action and option greeks. The order of priority never changes:

Preserve the capital
Everything else is downstream of still being able to trade next week.
Keep losses controlled
Which is what the stop-loss is for, set before entry, never after.
Then take the profit
In that order, and only in that order.

That is the order we work in. It is not a promise about any individual call. No method takes the risk out of the market, and anyone who tells you theirs does is selling you something.

Why the calls arrive the night before

Same reason. If you have put ₹5,00,000 into the market, that is still no reason to spend your productive hours staring at a chart. The call goes out the evening before, so the plan for tomorrow already exists before the market opens. You read it when you have a minute, you decide, and you place the order.

It also means there is no trading every day. Some days there is nothing worth sending. You stick to the price points, you save the time, and you skip the frustration of reacting to a message mid-session.

Four things we will never do

Never a call without a stop-loss. If the exit is not defined before the entry, it is not a call, it is a guess.
Never edit a call after the fact. Profit or loss, it stands exactly as it was sent. Changing a record to make it look better is the whole reason records in this industry cannot be trusted.
Never live-market calls on the small-capital plan. Two reasons. It defeats the point of not taking your day. And by the time a live message reaches you, the price has usually already moved, so you get the frustration without the opportunity.
Never anything outside SEBI's rules, however it is asked. Nobody has asked yet. The answer is ready anyway.

SEBI's own studies of individual traders in equity derivatives have found that most of them lose money. We are not going to pretend a subscription reverses that. The work is to tilt the odds for the people at the small end, by controlling the parts that can be controlled: a defined risk, a size you can hold, and a plan that exists before the market opens.

What we earn from, and what we do not

For a research analyst, this is the section that separates a practice from a tip service. So here it is in plain sentences.

Subscription fees are the only revenue. No brokerage sharing. No sub-accounts. No mutual fund distribution. No referral fees, no PMS or AIF referrals, no paid promotions.

No payment from any company whose stock we cover, in any form. If that ever changed, the recommendation would be labelled a promotional recommendation, in as many words, because the alternative is a confused subscriber.

We do not trade the recommendations we send. SEBI's regulations bar a research analyst and their associates from dealing in a recommended security within 30 days before and 5 days after publishing on it. In practice that means the options we recommend are not traded by us at all. Equity held outside those windows is the only exception, and the rule above is the boundary.

On price: SEBI caps what a Research Analyst may charge individual and Hindu Undivided Family clients at ₹1,51,000 per family per year, a limit SEBI revises from time to time. Our plans are a long way below it, and that is deliberate rather than modest. The service is built for people with under ₹5,00,000 of capital. A fee anywhere near the cap would defeat the point of the exercise.

Who should not subscribe

This plan is built for capital between ₹50,000 and ₹5,00,000. Below ₹50,000, we would rather you waited, and the reason is arithmetic rather than principle.

We do not predict which way the market will go. Calls are built so you can take either side. That means a run of stop-losses is a normal part of the plan, not a failure of it. If calls hit stop-loss three to five days running, you need enough capital left to trade on the sixth day. Start too small and you will be out of the game exactly when the plan needs you in it. Losses can be managed. They cannot be avoided, and managing them takes capital.

One more. If you want equity only, that is fine, but come with the right expectation: we do not swing trade equity. Equity recommendations are written to be held for a year or two, through a full cycle. If you need a result in three weeks, this is not the service for you.

If you want to stop

You can cancel at any point in your term. The amount for the period used up to the date of the request is deducted on a pro rata basis and the balance is refunded to the account you paid from. The full terms are captured at signup, where you also consent to the Most Important Terms and Conditions before any subscription starts.

And if the analyst is unavailable

There is no commitment to a fixed number of calls in a month, because that depends on what the market offers, and a call invented to hit a quota is worse than no call. There is a team behind the desk, so work continues through illness or leave, and the research still goes out under the registered analyst's name and signature.

Where the name comes from

The search was for a name with characteristics that matched the way we wanted to work. Flowers, birds, animals, all of it. The potoo turned up along the way: a bird in the owl family, and a name neither of us had heard before. Reading about how it actually behaves, the match with the approach was close enough to be funny. The domain was free. A few names went to a small poll of people around us, and Potoos is the one they picked.

Questions people ask before subscribing

Is Potoos a Research Analyst or an Investment Adviser?

A Research Analyst. The registration is INH000027380. A Research Analyst publishes research and recommendations on securities. An Investment Adviser advises you on your own portfolio and your own circumstances, under a separate SEBI registration whose number begins with INA. We do not do the second, and you should be clear which one you are buying. The full comparison is here.

Does the analyst trade the stocks and options Potoos recommends?

No. SEBI's regulations bar a research analyst and their associates from dealing in a recommended security within 30 days before and 5 days after publishing on it, which in practice means the recommended options are not traded by us. Equity held outside those windows is the only exception.

Does a stock advisory need access to my demat account?

No. Calls arrive with the entry, the target and the stop-loss, and you place the order yourself, in your own account, with your own broker. No login, no password, no account linking. Treat a request for your trading credentials as a reason to stop, whoever is asking.

What is the minimum capital to subscribe to Potoos?

₹50,000. Below that we would rather you did not subscribe yet, because a normal run of stop-losses can leave you without the capital to keep following the plan, which is the worst moment to be forced out.

Can I cancel a subscription and get a refund?

Yes. The amount used to the date of your request is deducted pro rata and the balance is refunded to the account you paid from.

How is a Potoos call made?

On most days a stock or an index trades inside a range. If that range runs from 0 to 100, the aim is to enter around 20 and leave around 80, deliberately not trying to catch the low or the high. The small-capital plan works mostly from price action and option greeks. The order of priority is preserve capital, keep losses controlled, then take profit, and calls go out the evening before the market opens with an entry, a target and a stop-loss.

Where can I complain if something goes wrong?

Raise it with us first. If you are not satisfied, escalate to SEBI through SCORES, or through SMART ODR for dispute resolution. Our grievance route and our monthly complaint data are both published on this site.

If the facts above hold up, the plans are on the homepage. Prices are published there rather than quoted on a call, so the number you see is the number you pay. See the three plans, or check our registration first. We would genuinely rather you did it in that order.