Simplifying trading concepts with In The Money by Zerodha

Nithin has often said that the stock market is the toughest place to make easy money.

I keep thinking about this line because it is a perfect encapsulation of the markets for most people. Whether you are investing or trading, making money is hard. There is often this neat distinction that investing is somehow respectable, and trading is somehow reckless. But that distinction is a little too convenient. You can lose money investing just as easily as you can lose money trading.

That said, trading is harder than investing for most people. And the honest truth is that most people probably shouldn’t trade.

This may sound tone-deaf coming from someone who works at a broker, but it is still worth saying. The problem is that even if you scream this every day for the rest of your life, people will still trade. That is just how markets work. People rarely learn from warnings. They learn from experience.

Trading also has a lot of cultural baggage. It is associated with gambling and speculation, and those are dirty words. But if you think about it, a lot of life is built on trades. The education you choose, the career you pick, the company you join, the business you start—all of these are trades in some form. You form a hypothesis, take a risk, and live with uncertainty. Not all of these trades work out.

Of course, the consequences in financial markets can be immediate and brutal, which is why the right response is not moralizing. It is education and guardrails.

At Zerodha, education has been at the heart of what we do from day one. Varsity started in 2013, and over the years, between Varsity, Trading Q&A, Z-Connect, Markets, Zero1, videos, audio, and all our other educational initiatives, we have tried to make high-quality financial education freely available to as many people as possible.

Varsity should be the go-to place for anyone who wants to learn the concepts: stocks, futures, options, technical analysis, risk management, and everything in between. But one area where we felt we could do more was contextual things about trading.

After COVID, there was a spectacular explosion of new traders and investors in India. This also coincided with the rise of finance influencers. And because greed is always front and center in the stock market, there was an industrial-scale production of dangerous nonsense, especially on YouTube.

This kind of content has probably done more to set wrong expectations, mislead people, and make them lose money than anything else.

That was one of the reasons we started In The Money by Zerodha.

The idea is not to give stock tips. We are not in the business of giving people fish. We are in the business of teaching people how to fish.

The channel is run by Sandeep Rao, who has spent over two decades in the markets as a trader and is also a SEBI-registered research analyst. The idea was simple: create thoughtful, contextual, and practical content that helps traders understand markets better.

The channel started with a weekly show looking at market data, what happened during the week, and what one could think about in the week ahead. But it has grown into much more than that.

Sandeep has covered the nuts and bolts of trading in detail: scalping, opening range breakouts, trend following, mean reversion, backtesting, trade ideas, weekly market metrics, market volatility, position sizing, and the basic building blocks a trader has to understand.

There is also a series on trading psychology based on Innerworth on Varsity, because in trading, the hardest part is often not the chart, the setup, or the strategy. It is the person clicking the button.

The channel has also covered things like whether you should become a full-time trader, whether you should take a loan to trade, what prop trading really is, how to build a career in the trading ecosystem, how to use AI tools in trading, the most useful books and research papers, and much more.

You can check out playlists we’ve created for different topics here: https://www.youtube.com/@InTheMoneybyZerodha/playlists

We have also started interviewing people who have actually traded, not people who merely provide gyaan about trading without knowing the first thing about it. These are people who have lived through markets, run money, built platforms, tested systems, survived drawdowns, and earned the right to speak. Guests so far include people like Tom Basso, Tom Sosnoff, Andreas Clenow, Nick Radge, Rob Hanna, and others, with many more in the pipeline.

The channel is now at about 40,000 subscribers and another 35,000 on the newsletter, grown almost entirely organically, without us talking about it much. I think that is a small testament to the quality of what Sandeep and the team are building.

The bar is the same as all our other educational initiatives: useful, honest, practical, and no-nonsense.

This is still just the beginning. We have a lot more in the pipeline, all with the same objective: to share as much as we know about trading, so that people can learn a thing or two and hopefully make fewer avoidable mistakes in their own trading process.

If you trade, want to trade, or know someone who does, do check out In The Money by Zerodha on YouTube and Substack.

And share it with a friend who might find it useful.

Interactive learning with Varsity Live

Instead of just reading or watching videos, you can also learn by doing with Varsity Live.

Varsity Live offers live, interactive sessions on topics like fundamental and technical analysis, personal finance, options trading, and more.

Whether it’s analysing balance sheets, learning to draw trend lines, building option strategies, or creating a personal finance plan, you can follow along through real-time demos, interactive leaderboards, and animated walkthroughs that make learning more hands-on and engaging.

You can explore live programs and register for a session at varsitylive.zerodha.com