Rainmatter

Update (9th Dec 2021): SEBI has put up a consultation paper, which I am guessing is due to their worry about the growing popularity of unregulated algo trading platforms that offer off the shelf automated strategies. Some of these platforms also make false claims of guaranteed returns. SEBI is absolutely right in being concerned and […]

India is the second-largest consumer of gold in the world after China. Gold holds a lot of cultural significance for Indians. The average Indian household has over 11% of its wealth in gold and it’s the second biggest asset among households after real estate. Gold and real estate combined account for 80-95% of Indian household […]

Fintech is hot🔥 right now. Everybody and their grandmother want to do some “fintech”. Q2, 2021 was the best quarter on record for fintech with $33.7 billion in funding – $1 out of every $5 VC dollars, according to CB Insights. But most of the money is still going into payments and lending. Deals in […]

Everything is fintech, and fintech is hot right now. According to CB Insights, Q1’21 was the best quarter on record for fintech, with $22.8 billion in funding. The same story is playing in India. According to Bain, fintech VC funding has grown from about $700 million in 2018 to $1.2 billion in 2020. Just halfway […]

In September 2020, SEBI notified the new changes to the Registered Investment Advisers (RIA) guidelines. There were a few big and important changes in the new guidelines:  Segregation of advisory and distribution at a client level Mandatory agreement between advisers and clients before any advice was given Capping of fees at 2.5% for AUM based […]

We have all heard of the lakhs of crores of Rupees worth of trading turnover that happens in the Indian capital markets every day, creating the illusion that the markets are massive. However, this post explains why they are not, and why looking at trading turnover to determine the market size is highly flawed. Trading […]

One of the biggest enablers for the growth of retail investments in India over the last 10 years has been Systematic Investment Plans or SIP in equity mutual funds. You select a mutual fund to invest in, decide how much you want to invest monthly, set up a bank ECS/NACH mandate form, and then money […]

I am happy to announce Rainmatter’s investment in ERPNext, the biggest Free and Open Source (FOSS) project out of India, and the biggest FOSS ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system in the world. While it is uncharacteristic of me to speak of a financial investment, I am personally excited about this for multiple reasons. ERPNext is […]

Edited: 1st Feb 2022 after the budget announcement that surcharge on LTCG (Long term capital gain) of unlisted companies to be capped at 15%. Overall LTCG for unlisted companies now drops from 28.5% to 23.92%.  We get a lot of credit for bootstrapping Zerodha and building the business without raising professional money. I have always […]

Negative news generally gets more views compared to happy news due to the Negativity Bias. Social media went berserk when the rumour broke out about the possibility of stock exchanges offering Direct Market Access (DMA) to retail customers without involving a brokerage firm, implying exchanges functioning as quasi brokers themselves. Several articles were published without […]

Update 28th Oct 2022: This Yourstory article claims that NSE has issued cease and desist notices to stock gaming apps. As we mentioned in this post below, regulations don’t allow the exchange market data feed to be used for any fantasy or gaming app.  Update 21st Apr 2023: NSE published a circular prohibiting the use […]

SEBI released a circular on June 5, 2020, announcing a regulatory sandbox to allow fintech companies to experiment and test their products in a live environment with some flexibility afforded with respect to regulations. This circular follows the one published by SEBI in May 2019 introducing an “Innovation Sandbox” for fintechs to try out products […]

Trading can be an extremely stressful activity. An emotional roller coaster that all of us face every day. I have interacted with tens of thousands of active traders for almost two decades now. A trend I have seen across many of them who have done well trading has been that, along with spending a lot […]

Update: April 25, 2020 SEBI put out this clarification on April 24, 2020 on the Know Your Client (KYC) process. It is in line with what we have described in the post below. While we have explained authenticating AADHAR through DigiLocker, The Ministry of Finance has put out this notification on April 22nd allowing AADHAR […]

October 1st, 2019 was quite eventful for the brokerage industry. In the US, Interactive Brokers introduced a“Lite” plan with no commissions, followed by Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, and more. These firms were charging up to $7 per trade. Stock prices of most of the large brokerage firms dropped 10% to 30% in one day. These […]

UPI is changing the payments landscape in India. You must have already seen metrics for the UPI platform published by the NPCI. We thought it might be interesting for you to see data on UPI at Zerodha, as we are one of the largest merchants on the UPI platform and our client demographics — people […]

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) released a circular on 20th May 2019 outlining the framework for innovation sandbox. This sounds like an interesting development for Fintech firms. Find below excerpts. Capital market in India have been early adopters of technology. SEBI believes that encouraging adoption and usage of financial technology(‘FinTech’) would have […]

Tradingview (TV) which offers a popular charting utility and also building a social network for traders recently acquired TradeIt for around $20 million dollars. This was after TV themselves had raised around $37 million in a VC round. TradeIt has a really interesting business model — enable financial publishers and app developers to easily link […]

Less than 1.5 crore Indians invested in the stock markets last year, out of which less than 70 lakh directly into stocks. For an economy like ours to truly reach its potential, we need people to back entrepreneurs by investing in their companies be it directly (stocks) or indirectly (mutual funds). We rely too much […]