1 year of Markets by Zerodha

One year ago, we launched a new YouTube channel called Markets by Zerodha (We know, a highly imaginative name).

The first show we started on the channel was called The Daily Brief, a daily podcast where we simplified what we considered the 2-3 most interesting stories in finance, business, and the wider economy. We felt that there was no good daily finance show in India that spoke to its audience as adults—something we could watch and read ourselves, without feeling patronised.

That podcast kept morphing—it became a YouTube show, a daily newsletter, an unending source of Twitter threads, and more. Fast forward one year, and The Daily Brief is one of India’s most popular finance publications in practically every format we’ve tried. On a given day, more than 20,000-30,000 people watch our videos. Almost as many listen to our podcast. Another 15,000-20,000 people read our newsletter.

We’ve never pushed these on anyone. We’ve never tried to “drive engagement”, or to implement some gauche, soulless “corporate content strategy.” We were just trying to learn about the world and have fun doing it. Everything else was organic; people seem to like how excited we get about the banal details of business and finance, and end up sharing what we do with their friends.

We never really had an ‘end goal’ with this, and we still don’t. None of us are from “the media”; none of us have a professional sense of how to grab eyeballs (and besides, even if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do with them). We’re all clueless geeks that are learning on the job.

And that means this is an evolving property—as we get better at this, the show changes its character. In just the last few months, we’ve become ambitious in the topics we tackle, from India’s waste crisis to how Indian ports work. We’ll probably get more ambitious as we go. We aren’t sure what we’ll be six months down the line—but we’ll make sure that we’re having fun and are learning cool new things we otherwise wouldn’t have come across. We promise that we’ll be honest with you—we’ll only talk about things that blow our minds. If you’re anything like us, they’ll probably tickle your fancy too.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep experimenting with new shows and newsletters. Only recently, we tried out The Chatter, where we handpick the most interesting, insightful comments that company managements make in their earnings calls and elsewhere. This isn’t masala, headline-grabbing stuff; these are quiet, hidden gems that put you in the shoes of a company and tell you something about how it sees its competition, sector, and the broader economy. It’s meant for insight, not entertainment—and that shows in the people who follow us. From senior investment analysts, to fund managers, to brokers, to budding finance enthusiasts, Chatter is mandatory reading.

Another rather popular newsletter we’ve put out is the ‘Aftermarket Report.’ We send this out after the markets close every day, and it summarises the day’s key market events, along with several useful data points.

There’s a lot more that we’re cooking up. We just started “What the hell is happening!?”—where we curate articles, videos, podcasts, and research papers that help us understand this weird, confusing moment in time, where the entire world is moving too fast to keep up. We’re also restarting some old favourites. We’re bringing back “Who Said What?”, where we run through some of the more interesting statements that important people make, and “Beyond the Charts,” where we mine through charts and graphs for insights about the world.

All of this is done by just eight people or so—we have a small team of researchers and writers that dive into a new obsession every day, and a production team that pulls through daily all-nighters to bring everything to you.

This isn’t nearly all we’ll do. We’re just getting started, and we have big ambitions. We hope that, someday, the Markets YouTube channels and newsletters become the go-to destinations for people to understand what’s happening in the markets, finance, and the broader economy.

But more importantly, we hope we can bring at least some more people to see how interesting markets really are. There’s a fascinating, overwhelming, beautiful, chaotic dance around us. We’re only just learning how to describe it.

If you have any feedback, brickbats, or suggestions for us, @ us on X (Twitter) at @zerodhamarkets or leave a comment on Substack.