Epilogue

The lights are on

Published 30 September 2026

Every number in this file is public. That is the strangest thing about it. Nothing here came from a leak, a whistleblower, or an investigation. The regulator counted the losses. The brokers filed the profits. The founder wrote the confession on his blog. The course sellers' accounts are in the enforcement orders. It has all been sitting in the open, the whole time, waiting for someone to read it as one story.

So read it one last time as one story. 1.13 crore people traded equity derivatives between FY22 and FY24. 92.8% lost - ₹1.81 lakh crore between them, ₹28 lakh each for the worst-hit 4 lakh. The winners were machines: 96-97% of professional profits ran through algorithms. The dealers took a cut of every order; the largest of them reports a 48% net margin and a ₹22,679 crore cash pile. The state raised its tax on the losses. The teachers sold the dream back to the losers - one of them collected ₹17 crore in course fees while losing ₹2.9 crore trading. And when the regulator finally slowed the machine, its own chairman stepped to a podium to promise the weekly lottery would not be shut down.

Everyone in this story behaved rationally. That is what makes it a system rather than a scandal. The brokers pursued profit. The exchanges pursued volume. The state pursued revenue. The influencers pursued subscribers. The regulator pursued stability. Every incentive pointed the same way, and at the end of every incentive stood a person in a small town with a phone and a hope, paying for all of it, ₹46,000 in the first year and counting.

The system's one vulnerability is arithmetic. It cannot survive its customers learning the base rates - truly learning them, the way they learn a salary or a price. So the base rates are disclosed in the fine print of an app screen you tap through, and studied in a PDF nobody reads, and this file has now put them in one place. That is all sunlight can do. The casino stays open. The lights, at least, are on.

If you trade these markets, nobody in this file is telling you to stop. The file only insists that you stop paying for the story that the odds are yours. They are not. They never were. The regulator counted. Now you know the count.

What this file is not: it is not an argument that derivatives should not exist. Futures and options have real uses - hedging a crop, a currency exposure, a portfolio - and the study that anchors this file says nothing against those uses. It counts what the market actually became: a mass-market retail product in which 99.8% of participants are individuals, nine in ten of whom lose, while the venue, the dealer and the taxman collect on every order. The question this file asks is narrower and harder: who decided that this product should be sold, at scale, to the country's youngest and poorest savers - and what each institution did once it knew the odds.

And one note for the reader who works inside the machine - the dealer's analyst, the exchange's product manager, the influencer's editor. You already knew every number here. The file was written so that the people paying your salaries' source - the crowd - can know them too. Read it, share it, argue with it in public. The arithmetic is not afraid of your argument.

File No. 1 · Banking HDFC Bank: the bank that never missed - until it did Three decades of public records on India’s largest private bank - the rise, the culture, the run-ins. Read the file →