Chapter 5

The young and the broke

Published 30 September 2026

The study's demographic tables read like a recruitment report - because they are one. Who is filling the seats at this table? The young, the low-income, and the brand new. The regulator measured all three trends, and all three are moving in the same direction: up.

Start with age. Traders under 30 were 31% of the individual F&O base in FY23. In FY24 they were 43%. And 93% of these young traders lost money in FY24 - a worse hit rate than the already-brutal 91.1% average for all individuals. In one year, the centre of gravity of Indian derivatives trading shifted by twelve percentage points toward people who have never seen a bear market as adults. Nearly all of them lost. The industry's growth story and the regulator's loss story are the same story, told from opposite ends of the money.

First salary, first margin call

Now the income table, which is worse. Over 75% of individual F&O traders in FY24 - 65.4 lakh people - had declared annual income below ₹5 lakh. And the share of these low-income traders is rising: 71% in FY22, 76% in FY24. Three out of four people trading the most leveraged product in Indian finance earn less than ₹42,000 a month. The average loser across the three-year study gave up ₹2 lakh - five months of that income, at the median, often much more. This is not disposable income being risked. It is rent money, EMI money, first-salary money, being converted into weekly option premiums one expiry at a time.

The direction of the trend is the indictment. As the warnings got louder - the SEBI studies, the mandatory risk disclosures, the news coverage - the trader base did not get richer or more sophisticated. It got poorer and younger. The recruitment machine is not finding people who can afford to lose. It is finding people who cannot, faster every year.

Forty-two lakh first-timers

The study tags every trader by vintage, and the FY24 tag cloud is startling. Almost half of all F&O traders in FY24 - 42 lakh people - were new traders, trading equity derivatives for the first time in three years. 92.1% of them lost money, an average of about ₹46,000 each in their first year. Picture the funnel: forty-two lakh newcomers arrive in a single year, nine in ten of them immediately donate an average of ₹46,000 to the other side of the table, and the machine books the revenue and sends the push notification for next week's expiry.

₹46,000 is the price of the lesson, and the lesson almost never takes. Which brings us to the study's bleakest persistence finding.

They come back

More than 75% of loss-makers persisted with F&O trading despite making losses in the preceding two consecutive years. Read it as behaviour, not statistics. A person loses in year one. Loses again in year two. The product's own regulator has published, twice, that nine in ten people in his position lose. And in year three, three out of four of those people are still at the table. This is not a market failing to warn its participants. It is a product that has metabolised its own warnings - where the documented certainty of losing functions, in practice, as no deterrent at all.

Any other consumer product with these numbers - nine in ten harmed, users returning anyway, recruitment skewing young and poor - would be studied as an addiction. The gambling researchers have a term for the mechanism: intermittent variable reward, the same payout schedule as a slot machine. The occasional win, unpredictable in timing and size, is precisely what makes a losing game impossible to walk away from. The ₹46,000 first-year loss is not the cost of an education. It is the first instalment of a habit the design is built to deepen.

The recruitment budget

None of this flow is organic. The under-30 wave, the low-income wave, the forty-two lakh first-timers - they arrive through one of the largest customer-acquisition spends in Indian consumer tech: referral bonuses, influencer deals, IPL sponsorships, campus finance content, and an app store full of interfaces designed to make a leveraged short-gamma position feel like a swipe. The demographics in the regulator's tables are the output of that spend. The machine knows exactly who converts, and the regulator's study confirms it is converting exactly them: the young, the broke, and the hopeful.

Paid for in prime time

How much does it cost to keep the seats filled with the young and the broke? The listed brokers tell you, in their own earnings calls, if you listen for it. Angel One's Q4 FY25 earnings call records ₹34.4 crore spent on an IPL partnership and related media in a single quarter - one broker, one quarter, one sponsorship. The IPL is where India's youngest, most male, most small-town audience sits for two months a year, and the ads between overs are not selling demat accounts to portfolio investors. They are selling the dream this file has been counting: trade, win, belong. The customer-acquisition machine runs in prime time because prime time is where the 43% lives.

Then layer the second pipeline on top: the finfluencers, the Telegram tips, the Instagram traders with the rented backdrops - an entire parallel recruitment force paid per conversion, which the regulator eventually had to legislate against directly. The under-30s did not wander into the most complex product in Indian finance by curiosity. They were carried in, on a conveyor built of sponsorships, referral codes and thumbnails. And the regulator's own tables record what happened next: 93% of them, relieved of their money inside the year.