Terms of service

1. Accepting these terms

This page sets out the agreement between you and Leoside Equity covering your use of this website, the research published on it, and any account you hold with us. We refer to all of that together as the service.

By opening the site, creating an account, or reading anything we publish, you agree to these terms. If any part of them is unacceptable to you, please stop using the service. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company or another organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it.

Two other documents form part of this agreement and you should read them alongside this one: our privacy policy and our research disclaimer. Where the research disclaimer says something specific about the content we publish, that wording takes precedence over anything more general written here.

2. Who we are

Leoside Equity is an independent publisher of written equity research and general market commentary. We are not a broker, a dealer, an asset manager, a fund, an investment adviser, a research analyst, or a financial institution of any kind, and we are not registered as any of those with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority, or any other regulator anywhere.

References to we, us and our in this document mean Leoside Equity. References to you and your mean the person using the service.

3. Who may use the site

You may use the service if you are at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into a binding contract where you live. If you are between 13 and 18, you may use the service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian who accepts these terms on your behalf. The service is not intended for children under 13 and we do not knowingly create accounts for them.

You are responsible for making sure that using the service is lawful in your country. Some jurisdictions restrict the distribution of market commentary. If you are in one of them, do not use the service.

4. Your account

Some material is available to anyone. Reading a full research note requires a free account. When you create one you agree to the following.

• Give accurate information and keep it current. Do not register under someone else's name or a false identity.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, whether or not you authorised it.
• Tell us promptly if you think someone else has gained access to your account.
• Use one account per person. Accounts are personal and may not be sold, shared, rented or transferred.
• Do not use automated means to create accounts in bulk.

You may close your account at any time from your account settings, or by writing to us. Closing an account does not by itself delete every record we hold, and our privacy policy explains what we keep and for how long.

5. The nature of what we publish

This is the most important section in this document. Please read it carefully.

Everything published on this site is general information and commentary produced for education and discussion. It is a description of how we think about a business, written for a general audience. It is not, and is never intended to be, any of the following:

• personalised financial, investment, legal, accounting or tax advice;
• a recommendation that any security is suitable for you or for anyone in particular;
• an offer, a solicitation, or an invitation to buy, sell, subscribe for or otherwise deal in any security or financial instrument;
• a promise, guarantee or prediction of any outcome, return or price;
• a substitute for professional advice obtained from someone who is licensed and who knows your circumstances.

Valuation stances, fair value bands, projected horizons and similar labels used in our reports are shorthand for an opinion held at a point in time by a writer with no knowledge of your situation. They describe how a price compares with an estimate of worth. They are not instructions to buy, sell or hold anything. They may be wrong. They may become out of date the moment they are published, and we are under no obligation to update or withdraw them.

Every decision you make about your money is yours alone. Investing carries risk, including the risk of losing everything you put in. Past performance tells you nothing reliable about future performance.

6. No advisory relationship

Reading our work, holding an account, or corresponding with us does not create an adviser and client relationship, a fiduciary duty, or any other professional relationship between us. We do not know your income, your obligations, your tax position, your time horizon or your tolerance for loss, and we are not attempting to assess any of them.

7. Acceptable use

You agree not to do any of the following, and not to help anyone else do them.

• Scrape, crawl, harvest or otherwise extract our content by automated means, except for a search engine indexing the site in the ordinary way and in line with our robots file.
• Use our content to train, fine tune, evaluate or otherwise develop any machine learning or artificial intelligence system, whether commercial or not, without our written permission.
• Republish a research note in full, or a substantial part of one, anywhere else. Quoting a short extract with clear attribution and a link is fine.
• Resell, sublicense, syndicate or otherwise commercialise our content.
• Circumvent, disable or interfere with the account requirement, the free preview, rate limits or any other technical measure we use.
• Probe, scan or test the security of the site, or attempt to gain access to any part of it that is not intended for you.
• Upload or transmit anything containing malware, or do anything likely to overload, damage or impair the service.
• Impersonate any person or misrepresent your connection with any person or organisation.
• Use the service in a way that breaks any law, including securities law, or that facilitates market manipulation or insider dealing.
• Remove, obscure or alter any notice of ownership, authorship or copyright.

8. Our content and your licence to it

All research notes, text, headlines, charts, images, the Leoside Equity name, the lion mark, the site design and the underlying code belong to us or to our licensors, and are protected by copyright, trade mark and other laws. Nothing in these terms transfers any of that to you.

We give you a personal, limited, revocable, non exclusive and non transferable licence to read, download and print our content for your own non commercial use. Every other right is reserved. If you want to do something beyond that, ask us first and we will usually say yes for reasonable requests.

9. Anything you send us

If you send us feedback, a correction, a company suggestion, a comment or any other material, you keep whatever rights you already had in it. You also give us a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free licence to use, reproduce, adapt and publish it in connection with the service, without payment and without any obligation to credit you.

Please do not send us confidential information, material non public information, or anything you are not free to share. We do not want it, and sending it to us does not create any duty of confidence on our part.

10. Links to other sites

Our notes link to filings, transcripts, data sources and other outside pages. We do not control any of them, we do not endorse them by linking, and we are not responsible for their content, their accuracy or their privacy practices. Once you follow a link you are subject to whatever terms apply there.

11. Emails from us

We email you about your account: confirming your address when you register, resetting your password when you ask, and letting you know about security matters or changes to these terms. These are part of the service. We do not send marketing.

12. Availability and changes

We publish on a stated calendar and we try to keep to it, but the service is provided on an as available basis. We do not promise that the site will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error free, and we may change, suspend, restrict or discontinue any part of it, including any feature, at any time and without notice.

We may also correct, amend, archive or withdraw any note at any time. Where a correction is material we will normally mark it clearly rather than change the text silently.

13. Suspension and closing an account

We may suspend or close your account, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe you have broken these terms, if we are required to do so by law, or if keeping the account open would expose us or other users to risk. Where the circumstances allow it we will tell you why.

You may close your account at any time. Sections that by their nature should survive termination will survive it, including sections 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 19.

14. No warranties

To the fullest extent the law allows, the service and everything in it is provided as is and as available, without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory. We specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, accuracy and non infringement.

We do not warrant that any information on the site is accurate, complete, current or reliable, that any opinion will prove correct, that any figure has been independently verified, or that the site will be free of errors, viruses or interruptions. Information is drawn from public filings and other sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not audit those sources and we cannot guarantee them.

15. Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither Leoside Equity nor anyone who writes for it or works with it will be liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profit, trading loss, investment loss, loss of opportunity, loss of goodwill or loss of data, however caused and on any theory of liability, even if we have been told such loss was possible.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we are not liable for any decision you make to buy, hold or sell any security, or for any loss that follows from one.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims connected with the service is limited to the amount you have actually paid us for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose. The service is free, so for a free account that amount is nil.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

16. Your indemnity to us

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Leoside Equity and the people who work with it against any claim, demand, loss, liability, cost or expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of your use of the service, your breach of these terms, your breach of any law, or your infringement of anyone else's rights.

17. Governing law and disputes

Talk to us first. If something goes wrong, write to us and give us thirty days to put it right. You agree to raise any complaint with us directly and to work through it in good faith before taking any other step. In practice almost everything can be sorted out this way, and neither of us wants a dispute over a free website.

If the matter is still unresolved after thirty days, these terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict of law rules, and the courts at Bengaluru, Karnataka have exclusive jurisdiction. You consent to that jurisdiction and venue.

If you are a consumer resident somewhere with mandatory local consumer protection, nothing here removes the protection those laws give you or your right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we will change the date at the top of this page. If a change materially reduces your rights we will make a reasonable effort to tell you in advance, by email if you hold an account or by a notice on the site. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, close your account and stop using the service.

19. General provisions

Whole agreement. These terms, together with the privacy policy and the research disclaimer, are the entire agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said or written before.

Severability. If any provision is found unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest will stay in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision on one occasion, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer your rights under these terms. We may assign ours to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure to perform caused by something outside its reasonable control.

No third party rights. Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

Territorial scope. The service is offered from India but is not directed at residents of India, and the content published here is intended for readers outside India. Nothing on the service is an offer or solicitation to any person in a jurisdiction where making it would be unlawful or would require a registration or licence we do not hold.

Headings. Section headings are for convenience and do not affect interpretation.

20. How to contact us

Questions about these terms can go to our email address. Please put the word Legal in the subject line so it reaches the right place.