Chapter 1

The scoreboard

Published 30 September 2026

Regulators do not usually publish scoreboards. In September 2024, India's did. The Securities and Exchange Board of India counted every individual who traded equity futures and options between FY22 and FY24, added up what they won and what they lost, and put the total in a press release. This chapter is that number, taken apart.

The headline is worth reading twice. Between FY22 and FY24, 1.13 crore unique individual traders incurred a combined net loss of ₹1.81 lakh crore in equity F&O - trading losses inclusive of transaction costs. One point one three crore people. One point eight one lakh crore rupees. This is not an estimate by a journalist, an opponent of the industry, or a rival product. It is the market regulator's own study of the entire trading population, and it says the quiet part at full volume: the single most common outcome of trading derivatives in India is losing money, and the aggregate loss is one of the largest wealth transfers ever documented in Indian markets.

How the regulator counted

The study's method matters, because the industry spent years attacking softer versions of these numbers. This is not a survey. Nobody was asked how their trading was going. SEBI took the entire population of individual F&O traders on the exchanges' own records - every PAN that traded equity derivatives between FY22 and FY24 - and computed profit and loss account by account, squaring off positions and then layering transaction costs on top. A parallel sample across the top fifteen brokers, the ones carrying most of the retail book, let the regulator slice the same numbers by age, income, gender, city and trade size. When the counter is the referee, there is nobody left to appeal to.

The counting itself produces the study's most quoted sentence, and it deserves to be read as written: more than one crore loss-making traders, 92.8% of everyone who played, losing on average about ₹2 lakh each. The sentence does not say the traders were foolish, or uneducated, or new. It says the game paid out to fewer than one in thirteen of them, at a cost to the rest of ₹1.81 lakh crore.

Nine out of ten, on average

The SEBI study puts the loss rate at 92.8% over the three years - more than one crore loss-making traders who lost, on average, about ₹2 lakh per person. Not 92.8% of trades. Not 92.8% of bad days. 92.8% of the human beings who participated, over thirty-six months, ended behind.

That average, of course, is not evenly shared. The study slices the losers by size, by depth, by desperation, and every slice is worse than the mean it sits under. But even the mean has a story to tell: a crore of people, three years, ₹2 lakh each, gone.

One year of it

Three-year totals can feel abstract, so take the single most recent full year in the study. In FY24 alone, individuals incurred about ₹75,000 crore in net losses in F&O. In one year. The Hindu's report on the study records the same figure and the same three-year total of ₹1.81 lakh crore spread across more than one crore traders.

The FY24 loss rate was 91.1% - about 73 lakh individual traders losing money in that single year. Every twelve months, a population larger than most Indian cities sits down at this table, and nine in ten leave poorer. Then the apps send a notification that a new expiry is live, and most of them sit back down.

Put the two numbers side by side and the machine's appetite comes into focus. Seventy-three lakh losers in a year is not a market failing to educate its participants. It is a market functioning exactly as designed, on fresh supply. The study's demographic tables show the supply is not drying up: it is getting younger, poorer, and more spread across the country's small towns with every passing year. The scoreboard does not have a recruiting problem. It has a survival problem - everyone who studies it knows the odds, and the seats fill anyway.

The costs are the point

One more cut of the FY24 number, because it decides what follows. The regulator counts two loss figures: gross trading loss and net loss after transaction costs. Individuals and others lost over ₹61,000 crore gross in FY24 - but about ₹75,000 crore net. The difference, on the order of ₹14,000 crore in a single year, is not anyone's trading loss. It is the toll: brokerage, exchange charges, stamp duty, SEBI fees, GST on all of it, and the securities transaction tax. It is collected from winners and losers alike, on every order, in both directions. The market can go up, down or sideways; the toll booth does not care.

The ones who left

Buried in the demographic tables is the study's only hopeful number, and even it is an indictment. The proportion of female traders in F&O fell from 14.9% in FY22 to 13.7% in FY24 - and where 91.9% of male traders lost money in FY24, 86.3% of female traders did. Read the direction of that. The cohort losing less is also the cohort quietly walking away. The cohort losing more is being handed referral codes.

The scoreboard never moves

The most damning property of this scoreboard is its stability. SEBI's first study of this market, published in January 2023, found 89% of individual equity F&O traders lost money in FY22. The updated study found 91.1% in FY24 and 92.8% across the three years. In between, the product was reformed repeatedly - new margins, new disclosures, a mandatory warning on every broker app telling the customer that nine out of ten people lose. The loss rate went up anyway. Every intervention so far has made the casino marginally more honest about its odds, and not one bit less effective at collecting.

A warning label that 73 lakh people a year read and ignore is not a warning. It is a receipt.

So the scoreboard stands, published by the referee itself: 1.13 crore players in three years, 92.8% of them losers, ₹1.81 lakh crore gone. Nobody contested it. Nobody even really tried. The number sat in a press release for a week of news cycles, and then the market went back to doing exactly what the number described. That shrug is the real headline - and it is where this file begins.