Chapter 3

The one percent

Published 30 September 2026

Every casino has winners, and every casino makes sure you know their names. In Indian F&O, the winners are real, they are counted, and they are vanishingly rare. The regulator's study puts a precise shape on the dream being sold: what it actually looks like to beat this market, and what beating it actually pays.

Here is the dream, with the regulator's arithmetic attached. Over FY22-FY24, only 7.2% of individual F&O traders made any profit at all. Only 1% managed to earn profits exceeding ₹1 lakh - after transaction costs - across the entire three years. One percent. Not one percent who got rich. One percent who cleared a single lakh, cumulatively, over thirty-six months. That is the top of the pyramid the screenshots are selling you: about ₹28,000 a year, before you count the hours.

What the winners actually won

The study's profit-maker table is the least quoted page in the document, and the most clarifying. Across the three years, profit-makers averaged about ₹3 lakh per person - against an average loss of about ₹2 lakh for the vastly larger losing population. In FY24 alone, profit-makers averaged ₹1.03 lakh per person, while loss-makers lost ₹1.20 lakh per person. The losers lost more, per person, than the winners won. The game's payout structure is inverted: even when you win, you win small; when you lose, you lose bigger.

Now hold that ₹3 lakh against what the dream costs to chase. Three years of screen time, of margin top-ups, of 9:15 adrenaline and expiry-day nausea - for a cumulative prize that a modest salary pays without the risk of the ₹28 lakh crater on the other side of the table. The winners are not the Lamborghini. The winners are a rounding error with a demat account.

The toll on the winners

Winning does not exempt you from the meter. Profit-makers paid roughly 22% of their gross profits away as transaction costs in FY24. Loss-makers paid transaction costs of about 27% on top of their gross losses. The toll booth collects from the cars going in both directions, and it collects a bigger cut from the ones leaving poorer. There is no outcome of a trade - win, lose, scratch - in which the house's cut does not get paid first. The one percent are not exceptions to the machine. They are its receipts: proof, printed in the regulator's own tables, that someone, somewhere, occasionally beats a game designed to collect from everyone.

Futures are not the escape hatch

The industry's quiet suggestion is that the losses are an options problem - that the serious people trade futures, where leverage is honest and the premiums don't decay to zero. The study looked at that too. In FY24, about 60% of traders lost money in futures - better than the 91.5% who lost in options, which only means the slower poison still works. Six in ten losers is the "skilled" version of this market. That is the ceiling the product offers its most sophisticated retail participants: a coin flip weighted against you, presented as the professional tier.

Every year, the losers out-earn the winners

The study's coldest line is almost an aside. In each of the three years examined, the loss-makers lost more money, in absolute terms, than the profit-makers made. Not proportionally more. Absolutely more. The total winnings of the entire winning class do not cover the total losses of the losing class in any single year - before the toll is even counted. The game does not redistribute money from the unlucky to the skilled. It concentrates money from the many to the few, shaves its own cut off every ticket, and hands back less than it took. The winners' pool is funded entirely by the losers, and it is always smaller than the hole it was scooped from.

The ₹1 lakh bar

Return to that 1% threshold, because its modesty is the point. SEBI did not set the bar at "life-changing money". It set it at ₹1 lakh over three years - about ₹2,800 a month - and 99% of participants still failed to clear it. The market being sold as an income replacement does not produce a side income for 99% of the people playing it. The dream's own regulator-published arithmetic says the realistic ceiling for nearly everyone is not wealth, not income, not even pocket money. It is a loss of ₹2 lakh, with a one-in-thirteen consolation of winning a sum too small to change anything.

Against that ceiling, consider the floor. There is no floor. The top 3.5% of losers averaged ₹28 lakh down. The game offers, on the regulator's own numbers, a capped dream and an open-ended pit - and then sells the dream at full price.

The maths of "anyone can make it"

The trading educator's favourite line is that anyone can be in the 1%. It is technically true and practically a lie, and the study shows why. The 1% is not a club you join by effort; it is a residue. In any given period, some fraction of a crore of people placing millions of near-random leveraged bets will end ahead - chance alone guarantees winners, the way a lottery guarantees a jackpot photo. The test of skill would be persistence: the same people winning year after year. The study's three-year window answers it without needing names: only 7.2% ended ahead at all across the full window, and only 1% ended meaningfully ahead. A skill that 99% of practitioners cannot acquire in three years of full-time effort is not a skill being taught. It is a lottery being narrated.

Meanwhile the cost of attempting to join the 1% is not flat. Every attempt runs through the toll, and the toll is proportional to activity - the more seriously you pursue the dream, the more orders you place, the more you pay the meter whether you win or not. The pursuit of the one-percent outcome is itself the machine's favourite customer behavior: maximum conviction, maximum activity, maximum fees, at the same base rate of ruin.

Why the one percent matter to everyone else

The one percent are load-bearing. They are the reason the other ninety-nine stay. Every loss in this market is privately justified by the existence of a winner - the friend of a friend who made it, the Twitter account with the P&L screenshots, the mentor who will show you the setup for ₹24,999. The dream requires the winners to be visible, so the winners are amplified far beyond their 1% share of the population and their ₹3 lakh share of the outcome. What the study adds is the missing denominator: for every one of them, there are ninety-two losers standing offstage, holding an average loss of ₹2 lakh and a story nobody wants to hear.

The casino needs its jackpot winners photographed at the door. The photograph is true. The 1% exists. The photograph is also the most expensive marketing asset in Indian finance, and it is paid for, at ₹2 lakh a head, by everyone not in the frame.