Teaching the Canon — Sharing Knowledge Responsibly

First published 26 Aug 2026 · Last verified 29 Aug 2026

Lesson 116.1 — Why Teach at All

Sanu Maya Rai has been buying and selling shares on the Nepal Stock Exchange for nineteen years. She teaches biology at a secondary school in Dharan, and every Saturday morning, six or seven neighbours gather in her small front yard with tea and notebooks. Some are retired army pension holders. Some are young cousins who just opened their first demat account. She calls it, half-jokingly, her "Saturday Sabha" — sabha meaning gathering or assembly, a word every Nepali knows from ward meetings and school functions.

Sanu Maya did not set out to become a teacher of investing. It happened the way most informal teaching happens in Nepal — someone asked her a question at a wedding, she answered it well, and word spread. Soon her phone was full of messages: "Didi, should I buy this share?" "Dai's friend told me to buy NIC Asia, is that good?" "My son is asking me to send money for IPO, is it safe?"

This chapter is about what Sanu Maya learned by trial and error over nineteen years of answering those questions — and about the invisible line she had to learn to walk. That line runs between teaching someone to think, which is a gift, and telling someone what to do, which is a risk both to them and to you.

Think of financial knowledge the way you would think of a skill passed down in a family trade. A carpenter's teacher does not carve every piece of furniture the apprentice will ever make. The teacher shows how to read the grain of the wood, how to hold the chisel, how to know when a joint is weak before it breaks. After that, the apprentice makes their own furniture — some pieces beautiful, some flawed, all of them theirs. If the teacher carved every piece for the apprentice, the apprentice would never become a carpenter. They would only ever be a pair of hands waiting for instructions.

Investing knowledge works the same way. If you tell your cousin "buy 50 shares of Nabil Bank tomorrow at 10 AM," you have not taught your cousin anything. You have simply moved the decision from your cousin's head into yours, and if the trade goes wrong, the disappointment — and sometimes the blame — moves back onto you. Worse, your cousin learns nothing except that decisions belong to other people. This is how financial dependency starts in families and communities, and it rarely ends well.

There is also a real regulatory reason to be careful here, not just an ethical one.

Sanu Maya's rule, refined over years, is simple: she will teach anyone who wants to learn, for free, for as long as they want to keep coming to the Saturday Sabha. But she will not tell anyone what to buy. Not her sister, not her best student, not even her own son. "I show them how to fish," she tells new arrivals to the group, borrowing the old saying everyone in Nepal has heard in some form. "I do not hand them the fish. If I hand them the fish today, they come back hungry tomorrow, and the day after, and one day I am not here to hand them anything, and they have learned nothing."

This chapter will walk through how she does this in practice: how to teach principles instead of picking stocks, how to gently correct the herd behaviour and tip-chasing habits that are extremely common in Nepali investing circles — at the tea shop, in the office lunchroom, in family WhatsApp groups — and how to know where your responsibility as an informal mentor ends and where a person's own responsibility for their own money must begin.

Lesson 116.2 — The Difference Between Teaching and Advising

Let's make the distinction from Lesson 116.1 completely concrete, because in the heat of a real conversation — especially with someone you love, who is anxious about money — the line gets blurry fast.

Imagine water flowing down from the hills into a village. A good irrigation teacher shows farmers how to build channels, how to read the slope of land, how to know when the monsoon will come and when it won't. The farmers then decide, field by field, how much water to divert to their own land, based on their own crop, their own soil, their own family's needs. A bad irrigation "helper" simply grabs the shovel and digs the channel to one farmer's field for him — and now that farmer never learns to read the land himself, and blames the helper if the channel silts up.

Teaching NEPSE investing works the same way. You can teach the shape of the land — how the market moves, what a price-to-earnings ratio means, why dividends matter, how NRB's monetary policy affects bank liquidity and therefore share prices — without ever telling a specific person to put their specific rupees into a specific company on a specific day.

Notice the pattern in every row of that table. The safe column teaches a method the learner can reapply forever, on any company, in any year, without you present. The risky column hands over a conclusion the learner cannot reproduce or verify on their own — which means next time, they will need you again, or someone else's tip again.

Sanu Maya has a specific phrase she uses at the Saturday Sabha whenever someone asks her a direct "should I buy" question. She says, in Nepali, "Ma tapaiko paisa ko jimmedar hoina" — "I am not responsible for your money." She does not say it coldly. She says it warmly, almost like a proverb, and then she immediately follows it with "but let's work out together how you would decide this yourself." That single sentence does two things at once: it protects her from being blamed later, and it protects the learner from becoming dependent on her.

Lesson 116.3 — A Worked Example: Teaching Bishnu Without Overstepping

Let's follow one real thread through Sanu Maya's Saturday Sabha, because abstract principles land better with a concrete story.

Bishnu is her husband's younger cousin, twenty-six years old, working at a mobile phone shop in Dharan bazaar. He came to the Sabha for the first time after his monthly salary finally let him save enough to open a demat account (the electronic account required to hold NEPSE shares, replacing the old paper share certificates). He arrived with a single question: "Sanu Maya didi, everyone at my shop is talking about a company. They say buy now before it goes up. Should I buy?"

Here is what Sanu Maya did not do. She did not say yes or no. She did not look up the company's price on her phone and give an opinion on the number. She did not say "I bought that one too, it's fine."

Here is what she did instead, step by step, over about twenty minutes:

First, she asked Bishnu what he actually knew about the company — not the price, but the business. What does it make or do? Is it a bank, a hydropower producer, an insurance company, a manufacturing company? Bishnu did not know. This told Sanu Maya the real problem was not which stock to pick, but that Bishnu had absorbed the habit of following talk instead of forming his own judgment.

Second, she taught him — using only publicly available information anyone can pull up on the NEPSE website or through a broker's app — how to find three basic things about any listed company: its recent profit trend over the last three to five years, its dividend history (whether and how much it has paid shareholders in cash or bonus shares), and its sector (banking, hydropower, insurance, manufacturing, hotels, and so on).

Third, she explained sector concentration risk using an analogy Bishnu understood instantly, because his own family are tea garden workers near Dharan: "If your whole family's income depends only on one tea garden, and that garden has a bad season — drought, pest, whatever — your whole family suffers together. If some of you also work in town, or farm vegetables, one bad season somewhere doesn't sink the whole family. A share portfolio is the same. If you only own hydropower shares, one dry winter with low water flow can hurt all of them at once, because they share the same weakness."

Fourth — and this is the important part — she never told Bishnu what to buy. At the end, Bishnu still had to decide for himself whether to buy the company his shop coworkers were discussing. What changed was that he now had a method: check the profit trend, check the dividend history, check what sector it's in and whether he already owns other things in that sector, and only then decide with his own money.

Three weeks later, Bishnu came back and reported, a little sheepishly, that he had looked up the company his coworkers were excited about and found it had reported declining profits for two straight years. He decided not to buy. Nobody told him not to. He worked it out himself, using a method someone had taught him. That is the entire goal of responsible mentorship in one small story.

Notice also what Sanu Maya avoided: she never disparaged Bishnu's coworkers by name, never called them foolish, and never made Bishnu feel embarrassed for almost following the crowd. She simply gave him a better tool. This matters enormously in a small-city, close-knit context like Dharan, where the people giving bad tips at the phone shop are also Bishnu's daily coworkers and possibly his friends. A mentor who makes a student feel ashamed of their social circle creates conflict in the student's daily life long after the mentor has gone home.

Lesson 116.4 — Correcting Herd Behaviour Without Wounding Pride

Herd behaviour — the tendency to buy or sell because everyone around you is doing it, rather than because of your own analysis — is probably the single most common bad habit an informal mentor in Nepal will encounter. It shows up everywhere: tea shop conversations where one loud voice names a stock and three others nod along, office lunch tables where a colleague's "sure thing" tip spreads department to department, and family gatherings — a wedding, a bratabandha, a puja — where a relative just back from a good trade holds court while everyone listens.

Herd behaviour feels good in the moment because it is social. Buying what everyone else is buying makes you feel like part of the group, not alone with your decision. This is precisely why it is hard to correct — you are not just correcting a financial mistake, you are asking someone to feel comfortable standing apart from people they see every day.

Think of it like buying vegetables at the haat bazaar, the weekly open market. If you see a long queue at one vegetable seller's stall, your instinct is that the vegetables must be fresher or cheaper there, so you join the queue too — even without checking the price or the quality yourself. Sometimes the queue is long because the vegetables really are good. But sometimes the queue is long simply because it started forming and people kept joining without checking. The stock market's herd behaviour is exactly the same instinct, just with rupees instead of radish.

Sanu Maya's approach to correcting herd behaviour has three steps she has repeated for years, refined after some early attempts that did not go well. Early on, she once told a Saturday Sabha member bluntly, "You're just following the crowd, that's not investing." The woman did not come back for two months, and when she returned, she admitted she had felt scolded in front of the group. Sanu Maya learned from that.

Her current approach:

Step one: acknowledge the social pressure out loud, without judgment. "It's very natural to feel that if five people around you are buying something, they must know something you don't." This takes the sting out of the moment — the person does not feel accused of being foolish, because the mentor has just described a universal human tendency, not a personal flaw.

Step two: ask a curious question rather than issuing a correction. Not "why are you following the crowd," which sounds like an accusation, but "what do those five people actually know that made them buy — did they check the company's numbers, or did they hear it from someone else who heard it from someone else?" Very often, when someone traces the tip backward, they discover it is a rumour with no origin anyone can name — the financial equivalent of a story that changed each time it was retold at the tea shop, until nobody remembers who started it or whether it was ever true.

Step three: replace the herd's authority with a checkable fact. Instead of arguing against the crowd's opinion, she hands the person one specific, verifiable thing to check — the company's latest quarterly report, its dividend history, its price movement over the past year compared to the whole NEPSE index. A fact the person can check themselves is far more persuasive than any argument the mentor can make, because it produces the person's own conclusion instead of asking them to trade one authority (the crowd) for another (the mentor).

There is one more layer to correcting herd behaviour gently in the Nepali context specifically: face, or ijjat. Publicly contradicting someone's investment decision at a family gathering, in front of others, can feel to them like a loss of face, especially if the person who gave the original tip is older or more senior. Sanu Maya handles this by never correcting anyone in the moment, in front of the group that pressured them. She waits, and raises it privately, one-on-one, sometimes days later over tea, framed as her own curiosity rather than a correction: "I was thinking about what your uncle said the other day — has anyone actually looked at the company's report?" This preserves everyone's dignity while still doing the real work of teaching.

Lesson 116.5 — Boundaries: What a Mentor Should Never Do

Every trade or craft passed informally from an experienced person to a beginner has certain boundaries the teacher must never cross, precisely because crossing them harms the student, not just the teacher. A driving instructor should never grab the wheel and drive the car themselves while calling it a "lesson." A cooking teacher should never simply hand a finished dish to a hungry student and call it teaching. In investing mentorship, the boundaries are just as concrete, and Sanu Maya has hard rules for each one.

Rule one: never manage another person's account, password, or trading decisions directly. If a mentor logs into a friend's TMS (the Trading Management System used by NEPSE brokers to place buy and sell orders online) and places trades on the friend's behalf, the mentor has stopped teaching and started operating as an unlicensed portfolio manager — exactly the line SEBON regulation draws. Even with good intentions, and even for free, this exposes both people to real risk: if the trade loses money, the friendship carries the loss; if it gains money, the friend never learns anything except to ask again next time.

Rule two: never accept money, gifts, or commission tied to a specific recommendation. If Sanu Maya ever accepted even a small "thank you" gift explicitly linked to a stock tip that worked out — say, someone bringing her mustard oil or a sari because "your suggestion made me profit" — she would be edging toward compensated advisory activity without a license, and she would also be creating an incentive to tell people what they want to hear rather than what is true. She happily accepts tea, dinner invitations, and general goodwill for running the Saturday Sabha as a whole, since this is ordinary community reciprocity, not payment for a specific financial recommendation.

Rule three: never predict specific prices or specific timing. "This will hit 800 rupees by Dashain" is a prediction no one can honestly make, no matter how experienced they are, and if it turns out wrong, the mentor's credibility and the student's trust in the entire process — not just in that one prediction — can collapse together. Sanu Maya teaches students to think in ranges and scenarios, never in confident single numbers: "if the company keeps growing profit at this rate, and if the sector stays stable, here is roughly what a reasonable valuation might look like" — always qualified, always showing the reasoning, never delivered as a bare prophecy.

Rule four: never diagnose or manage someone else's overall financial life without qualification. A person's investing decisions do not exist in isolation — they are tangled up with debt, family obligations, insurance needs, retirement timelines, and risk tolerance that only a licensed financial planner is trained to assess holistically. If a mentee says "I want to take a loan against my house to buy shares," this is far beyond stock-picking advice — it touches debt risk, family security, and legal obligation. Sanu Maya's answer to this kind of question is always the same: "That is a bigger decision than I can help you with fairly. Talk to your family, and consider a proper financial advisor or your bank's loan officer, before doing anything with the house." She resists the pull to feel flattered that someone trusts her judgment on something this large, because that flattery is exactly what leads mentors past their depth.

Rule five: never let a teaching relationship become a source of guilt or blame. This is subtle but important. If a mentee loses money after a conversation with you — even a conversation where you carefully only taught principles and never gave a specific instruction — some people will still, emotionally, associate the loss with you, especially if you are a respected elder or relative. Sanu Maya handles this by stating her boundary out loud at the very first meeting with any new person, not after something goes wrong: "I will teach you everything I know. I will never tell you what to buy. Whatever you decide, the result is yours — good or bad — because the decision was always yours." Saying this early, before any money has changed hands or any trade has happened, protects both people from a painful conversation later.

Lesson 116.6 — Building a Healthy Teaching Circle, Not a Dependent One

The final piece of responsible teaching is thinking about the shape of the group itself, not just individual conversations. A teaching circle can be built in a way that creates independent thinkers, or it can be built — even accidentally, even with good intentions — in a way that creates a cluster of people who all just wait for the mentor's opinion before acting. Sanu Maya has watched both patterns happen in Dharan over the years, in her own group and in others, and she has strong opinions about what separates them.

A dependent circle has a single centre. Everyone brings questions to one person, that person answers, and the group's only real activity is receiving answers. Over time, the members become less capable, not more, because every capable action — checking a report, questioning a rumour, deciding to buy or not buy — has been quietly outsourced to the centre of the circle. When that central person is unavailable — busy, unwell, or simply gone one Saturday — the whole group is lost, because nobody in it has practiced deciding for themselves.

A healthy circle has many centres. Members bring questions to the group as a whole, and the mentor's job shifts from answering to facilitating other members answering each other. Sanu Maya has deliberately cultivated this at her Saturday Sabha over the years. When a new question comes up — "what do people think about this company's latest results" — she often does not answer first. She asks who in the group has already looked at the report. She asks the newest member what they think before the most experienced member speaks, so newer voices are not simply drowned out by the ones people are used to deferring to. She has, over nineteen years, watched three or four of her early students become confident enough to run their own small study circles elsewhere in Dharan and even in Itahari — which she counts as her biggest success, not a loss of her own group's members.

There is also a broader community responsibility worth naming here, beyond any single circle. Nepal's investing culture is young compared to markets with a century or more of history, and NEPSE itself has grown enormously in the number of ordinary retail investors — including many first-time investors from remittance-earning families, newly employed young people, and retirees relying on pension lump sums. Informal peer teaching, of the kind Sanu Maya does every Saturday and of the kind countless unnamed people do at tea shops and family gatherings across the country, is quietly one of the most important forces shaping whether this new generation of investors becomes financially literate or becomes rumour-driven. A responsible mentor understands they are not just helping one cousin or one neighbour — in aggregate, thousands of small, careful, boundary-respecting conversations like the ones described in this chapter are what stand between a healthier NEPSE culture and one dominated by tips, panic, and herd stampedes.

This is, in the end, the deepest reason to teach principles instead of picking stocks for people. A stock tip helps one person for one trade. A well-taught principle — how to read a report, how to question a rumour, how to sit with uncertainty instead of chasing the crowd — travels. It travels from Sanu Maya to Bishnu, and someday, if the pattern holds, from Bishnu to someone younger who asks him the same anxious question he once asked her: "Should I buy this?" And if Bishnu answers the way he was taught, the chain continues, one careful conversation at a time, long after any single teacher is gone.