What the study found
SEBI's earlier study, covering FY22 to FY24, found that 93% of individual traders in equity futures and options lost money, with aggregate losses above ₹1.8 lakh crore over three years.
The updated study for FY25 found over 91% of individual traders in the segment made losses. Net losses widened to roughly ₹1,05,600 crore, up about 41% from the previous year, after transaction costs.
The study covered the top 13 brokers, with a combined base of around 96 lakh unique F&O traders. The average individual trader lost about ₹1.1 lakh over the year.
The number that gets misread
People sometimes read “91% lost money” as “9% have found a method”. That is not what the data supports. A single profitable year in a population of millions is what you would expect from chance alone, and the studies do not show a stable group of consistent winners emerging.
The more useful figure is the average loss. ₹1.1 lakh is, for a lot of young traders, several months of salary — and it is an average that includes people who traded for a week and stopped.
Why participation still fell
The number of unique individual traders in the segment fell from about 61.4 lakh in the first quarter of FY25 to about 42.7 lakh in the fourth — a decline of roughly 30% across the year.
SEBI attributed part of that to measures aimed at curbing speculation: limiting weekly expiries and raising contract lot sizes, which pushed the minimum capital at risk per trade up substantially.
What we teach, and what we do not
We do not teach F&O strategies, and we do not plan to. What this site offers is the arithmetic and the incentives — enough to read a claim like this one critically when a friend describes their week.
If you find yourself trading to recover a loss, that is the pattern worth paying attention to rather than the position. It is the same mechanism as any other form of chasing — the psychology behind fantasy sports and betting apps too. Tele-MANAS (14416) is there when it stops feeling like a choice.