This was our first year as India’s direct-only AMC, Zerodha Fund House. Our AUM has grown significantly, all without us actively pushing anything.
The good thing about being passive-only is that it aligns the incentives for both the customers and us. For the customers, it means access to good, low-cost products, and for us, it eliminates the risks that have recently made headlines.
Read this post – One year of Zerodha Fund House by Vishal Jain.
We’ve added a new module on Varsity, covering all aspects of investing in the National Pension Scheme (NPS).
The NPS is a defined contribution scheme regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA). It’s an excellent option for building your retirement savings as it encourages investing in a diversified portfolio of equity and debt.
Along with diversification, as NPS investments are locked in until the subscriber turns 60, it also helps you remain disciplined with your investments and avoid unnecessary tinkering.
In this Varsity module, we cover all the aspects of NPS to help you understand if this suits your investment needs or not. Read the module on Varsity or watch the video on YouTube.
Companies will start reporting their quarterly earnings for the December quarter from today. You can keep track of quarterly results for the stocks in your portfolio on Console timeline powered by Tijori.
Console timeline is a feed of key events and developments related to your investments. It’s like a social media feed but for your portfolio.
Check it out here.
You can also follow @marketalertsz on X (Twitter) to get instant alerts about quarterly results.
Looking back, 2024 was probably the best year for the brokerage industry, and it’s starting to look like the best is behind us, at least for the foreseeable future. 😬
In terms of options turnover, we are back to 2022–23 levels. This is even before the impact of the increased lot sizes, which take effect in January 2025.
We just published a post reviewing 2024 at both Zerodha and across the broking industry. The link to the full post is here.
Happy New Year!
As we step into 2025, it’s a good time to take a closer look at your personal finances. And by that, we don’t just mean your investments—those are just one part of your finances. A financial plan that doesn’t consider your unique life circumstances will always be incomplete.
In this two-part post, we highlight the important aspects that you should take care of when managing your personal finances.
Part one helps gain a better understanding of your personal finances by reviewing your goals, managing debt, insurance planning, and more.
Part two focuses on managing your investments and, most importantly, understanding and improving your financial behavior.
I don’t know if it is a good time with the fall in the markets 😬, but we are finally launching MTF (margin trading facility) which allows you to buy stocks for delivery by borrowing money from us.
I haven’t been sure about this product for a long time because of obvious reasons. Customers who trade for delivery tend to ignore the impact of the cost of borrowing, and there’s always the risk of the trade going against them, which leads to a bigger loss.
But in the last 3 to 4 years, MTF has grown tremendously, with pretty much everyone offering it. Considering the number of customers asking us for the feature, it didn’t make business sense for us to not offer it.
But yeah, like with everything else, we will never push this to customers and trigger them to trade.
More here.
SEBI recently published a consultation paper on algo trading for retail investors.
My understanding of it is it should be ok for savvy traders using APIs for individual trading with some reasonable order limits. But the APIs have to be accessed through only static IPs, but this isn’t hard to get.
But platforms that offer algos or readymade strategies will need to get them approved through the broker. The broker, in turn, has to register all algos and strategies with the exchanges.
The broker also has to ensure that customers are following the same strategies that were registered. That means brokers will have to build and offer the infrastructure for people to run their algos and ensure compliance.
We wrote about the consultation paper on Markets by Zerodha recently.
Keeping up with upcoming events like dividends, bonuses, stock splits, quarterly results, and other corporate actions across multiple companies can be overwhelming. Tracking this information manually is time-consuming and also increases the chances of missing key updates.
This is why we have made it simpler with events search on Kite. You can now easily find stocks with upcoming corporate actions just by searching for the type of event you are interested in.
On Kite, go to the Marketwatch search, select Events, and search for any corporate action like dividends, bonuses, quarterly results, etc.
Note: Events search is currently available on Kite web and will be available on the Kite app in coming updates.
Numerous companies make business-related announcements every day. However, not all of them are significant. To help you stay informed, we’ve launched a new X (Twitter) account, Market Alerts by Zerodha: @marketalertsz
Get instant summaries of key exchange filings as soon as they happen. These alerts are delivered in real time by Tijori.
Despite all the interest in the stock market after COVID, there are still only 5 crore unique mutual fund investors. I’ve said this earlier as well—one of the biggest challenges for the Indian markets is the lack of an advisory ecosystem with just about 900 RIAs.
If you consider mutual fund distributors, there are about 2.7 lakh+ plus, but still not enough. For a broad comparison, there are over 27 lakh+ insurance agents. If Indian markets have to expand, not only do we need RIAs but MFDs as well. Moreover, it’s tricky to make the RIA model work in smaller cities and towns.
Even though we only offer direct plans at Zerodha, we know that they are not for everyone. Which means distributors will always have a role to play. Being a mutual fund distributor is also a good career option for a lot of people.
So we have teamed up with Hansi Mehrotra to launch Money Mindful, a free video series to help you prepare for the NISM distributor exam and then start your career. We’ve also partnered with AssetPlus, which helps distributors start their business once they pass the exam through Rainmatter.
Check out the post here.
You can now use margin received from pledging securities to trade Commodity F&O on both, MCX and NSE.
What is pledging?
If you are holding stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, and bonds in your demat account, these securities can be pledged as collateral margin, which can be used for equity intraday trading, trading futures, writing options, and now commodity F&O trading.
Watch our video guide on pledging securities here.
At Zerodha, we provide a single ledger facility that allows you to trade in both equity and commodity segments (MCX and NSE Commodity) using the same funds in your trading account. To enable this facility on the Kite app, follow the steps below:
You can also follow our step-by-step video on activating the single ledger here.
Allowing transactions in unlisted shares is a violation of SEBI regulations. Clarification from SEBI, today.
Medical expenses are the biggest financial burden households face, which makes having health insurance a must. Here’s a guide to choosing the right health insurance plan and handling claim rejections by Ditto Insurance.
We’re excited to support the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund, a program dedicated to making open-source projects more secure and sustainable. The fund offers developers financial support, security education, mentorship, and more.
If you are working on an open source project, you can apply for this program until 7th January.
These fake app and website scams keep getting worse and worse. Not a day goes by where I don’t read about such scams or hear from people who’ve been affected. The scale of these scams is just insane.
There are now countless phishing scams that take advantage of the familiarity of all major brands, celebrities, etc. The tricks vary—fake apps, fake websites, fake social media profiles, scam calls—but all with the same goal: to steal your money. We’ve discovered multiple such scams in the name of Zerodha.
These scams work because they take advantage of our emotions like hope, fear, and greed. Two simple rules that can protect you:
1. Never act in a hurry and always verify.
2. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Be extremely suspicious about everything. If you’re seeing this post, you’re probably already aware of these scams, so please share this with your friends and family who might be more vulnerable.
It’s been 10 years since we started Varsity. What began as a simple blog has gradually grown into a full-fledged stock market education initiative. Today, Varsity spans text, video, audio, and our latest addition—a live format called Varsity Live. It’s an interactive, live education program and the first of its kind.
When we started, Karthik and I decided that Varsity would have no agenda. There would be no pitching of Zerodha to Varsity users, no mandatory login, or anything else. Ten years later, we’re proud to say we’ve stuck to the original principle. We have over two million users on Varsity, and we still don’t know if they even have Zerodha accounts. 😬
By the way, here’s the link to Varsity Live. If you’re interested, there’s a course starting tomorrow. 😃
Markets will remain closed on Wednesday, November 20, 2024, on account of Assembly Elections in Maharashtra.
Keep track of all trading holidays here.
If you are an active investor in the stock markets, then you know a lot has changed in how stocks are settled in India. Here’s a new change that you should know about🧵👇
Why does this matter?
This simplifies the broker’s responsibilities as it will no longer have to upload pay-in/payout instructions to the CC.
The broker will still be responsible for ensuring the accurate and timely reporting of client trades, managing clients’ margin trades, verifying all direct payouts, and addressing any discrepancies in the direct payout process.
Where will the CC payout the shares? The primary demat account mapped with your trading account at the stock exchange will receive the credit.
As a client, your trading and investing experience will not change. But there is one change. Earlier, if you bought shares using Margin Trade Funding (MTF), you needed to authorize the pledging of shares via an OTP. This is no longer needed, making the experience a lot smoother.
You can check out this post for more details.
Corporate growth, in both the public and private markets, seems to be plateauing across most sectors.
Even in the private markets, in most cases, valuations in the earlier funding rounds were already far over the fundamental value or expected growth of startups, which is why there’s hardly any news about funding for later-stage startups.
Read more on the topic by Markets by Zerodha.
I hadn’t realized how popular this Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) trend had become until I saw this Zero1ByZerodha video😬. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to retire early, but retirement isn’t just about money.
From what I’ve seen, many people don’t consider all the financial, emotional, and psychological pitfalls of retirement and end up regretting it later. So, if you’ve been thinking about retiring early, here are some things you should know.
Also, here’s some more data from The Ken
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