Prologue

The raw material

Published 30 September 2026

On a Tuesday morning in 2024, somewhere between Indore and Jaipur, a 24-year-old opened a trading app with his first salary and bought a weekly option. The regulator can tell you what happened next - not because anyone reported him, but because the regulator counted everyone.

In September 2024, the Securities and Exchange Board of India published a study of every individual who traded equity futures and options in the country between FY22 and FY24. Not a sample. Everyone: 1.13 crore unique individual traders, and a combined net loss of ₹1.81 lakh crore over three years. 92.8% of them lost. The referee of Indian markets stood up, in public, and said: we counted, and the game takes money from nine out of every ten people who play it.

What makes that study extraordinary is not the number. Anyone paying attention knew the number. What is extraordinary is everything that happened after it was published - which is, in the ways that matter, nothing. The apps kept onboarding. The influencers kept teaching. The weekly expiries kept expiring. The state raised its tax on the trade and called it deterrence. The brokers reported record years, then record cash piles, then - when the regulator finally slowed the machine - explained to their analysts that margins would bounce back.

This file is the record of that nothing. Fourteen chapters, each standing on its own, each pinned to a public source - the regulator's own study, the brokers' own filings and earnings calls, the courts' and settlement orders, the founder's own blog. The scoreboard, the crater inside it, the winners' real winnings, the machines on the other side of the screen, the young and the broke being recruited, the map of where the losses live, the dealers' cut in three acts, the expiry machine, the tax on hope, the course sellers and their own accounts, the house's testimony in its own words, and the exits that mostly didn't happen.

Read it the way the industry hopes you won't: as one story. Because it is one story - a transfer of ₹1.81 lakh crore from the people who could least afford it to the institutions that designed the game, measured precisely by the referee, and allowed to continue by everyone who read the measurement. The young man with his first salary is not the villain or the fool of this story. He is the raw material. This is the file about who processed him.

A word on method before the curtain goes up. This file quotes no anonymous sources and prints no unverifiable claim. When it says 92.8% of traders lost, the number comes from the regulator's study of the entire trading population, linked in the text. When it says a broker earned 48% net margins, the figure comes from that broker's own statutory filings. When it says a course seller lost ₹2.9 crore trading while selling profit to students, the finding is in the regulator's enforcement order. Every chapter ends with its evidence list. Check any line; the file expects to be checked.

The cast is worth meeting early, because you will see them in every chapter wearing different costumes. There is the crowd - 1.13 crore strong, young, small-town, earning less than the product costs. There are the professionals - a few hundred algorithmic entities who take home nearly all the winnings. There are the dealers, listed and unlisted, whose revenues rise with the crowd's activity and never with its success. There is the state, taxing every hand. There are the teachers, monetizing the hope. And there is the referee, who counted everything, published everything, and then kept the game running. None of them hid. That is the story.