The other common trading mistake I have seen over and over again in all my years of being a trader and running a brokerage is over-trading and revenge trading.
Sometimes, the best trade is the one you don’t take.
This is why we launched Kill Switch. If you get the urge to keep trading, you can enable it, and you won’t be able to place trades for the rest of the day.
I think we’ve finally found a way to teach finance and markets online with both quality and scale with Varsity Live.
We’ve had 2.3 lakh registrations so far, with about 3,000 new people signing up every week. By the way, this Sunday, the 23rd, we’re hosting a finance boot camp for kids. Most of this is a result of people discovering Varsity Live and sharing it with their friends and family.
For almost 12 years now, since we started Varsity, we’ve gotten the same question: what’s the agenda? Why no advertising? Why not collect emails and mobile numbers? Why no spam or push notifications nudging people to trade?
We’ve (most of them by Karthik Rangappa 😀) answered lakhs of questions over the years—first through the website, then videos, and now live sessions. But the answer to that question has always been simple: to share whatever we know and play our part in spreading financial literacy among Indians.
Plus, we’re lucky to be in a position to build all of this without expecting something in return. 🙂
Portfolio update of a colleague at work. He’s now invested in 3,100 stocks (it was 2,100 last time), taking diversification to its logical extreme. 😀
At least he’s beating G-Secs.
Btw, you can check your account’s performance on Console.
Infy is one of the most highly held stocks by investors, and the record date for their massive buyback is November 14th, the biggest buyback ever in India. That is, you can participate in the buyback if you hold the shares in your demat account as of November 14.
I think it is essential to understand how you will be taxed on this. If you participate in the buyback at Rs 1800 (current price is ~Rs 1550), here’s the taxation:
The money you receive from the buyback is considered income from other sources and is taxed at your applicable slab rate. And, the entire investment value is then considered as a capital loss.
One scenario where the buyback becomes attractive is when you have other capital gains that can be offset against these capital losses. By the way, if the investment was done <1year, then it is a short-term capital loss, and >1 year, it is a long-term capital loss.
Otherwise, it is essentially like a dividend.
Btw, the Tax P&L reports on Console have a separate section for buybacks to make things easy for you
Starting December 8, 2025, NSE will introduce a pre-open session for index and stock futures, similar to what already exists for the equity segment.
Here’s all you need to know👇
What is a pre-open session?
The pre-open session is a 15-minute window from 9:00 am to 9:15 am when traders can place, modify, or cancel orders, but trades don’t happen immediately.
Instead, the system collects all buy and sell orders and determines a single opening price (called the equilibrium price) based on demand and supply. This session aims to make opening prices more stable and reduce volatility when the market starts.
Which contracts are included?
The pre-open session will apply to current-month futures on both stocks and indices. – In the last five trading days before expiry, it will also include next-month futures.
However, options, far-month features, and spread contracts will not be part of the pre-open session. Also, if an underlying stock has a corporate action (like a merger or demerger) on a particular day, its futures will skip the pre-open session that day.
How is the opening price decided?
The opening (equilibrium) price is based on the point where maximum buy and sell quantities match, essentially where demand and supply meet most efficiently.
If multiple prices qualify, the one with the least order imbalance (fewest unmatched orders) is chosen. If there’s still a tie, the price closest to the previous day’s closing price is selected.
And if no trades occur during the pre-open session, the first trade in the normal session sets the opening price.
For example, during pre-open, there are: Buy orders for 500 contracts of Nifty futures at ₹25,500 and sell orders for 500 contracts at ₹25,500. The system will match them here, and ₹25,500 becomes the day’s opening price.
What happens to unmatched orders?
Limit orders that remain unmatched will carry over to the normal market. – Market orders will be converted to limit orders at the discovered opening price and moved to the normal session. – If no equilibrium price is discovered, market orders move at the base price (previous day’s closing).
You can read the exchange circular here.
We’re happy to support The Ken for India’s first Case-Build Competition, a challenge for college students across India to think like disruptors.
Pick any Indian company, find opportunities for change, and build an AI-powered product that could reshape the way it works.
Top entries will get a chance to present their ideas to India’s leading founders and CEOs and win ₹10 lakhs in prize money.
Submissions for round 1 close on October 15.
From 2021, I had been tweeting about the risks to the broking business, but somehow I kept getting surprised on the upside. But starting around October last year, all the risks I was thinking about crystallised. First came the STT increase on options, then the removal of exchange transaction charge rebates, and a reduction in weekly expiries. In addition to this, there was a significant decline in market activity. Due to all these factors, our revenues and profits suffered a decline. This year, we are seeing a drop in broking revenues of about ~40%.
Having said that, I’ve never looked at quarterly or even yearly growth because Zerodha is perhaps the only broker in the world with the luxury of thinking long-term and continuing to do what’s right for our customers despite short-term business volatility. This is in large part because we don’t have any external investors or pressures to answer to.
Despite the financial headwinds, the last year was also a good year in a lot of ways. In terms of products, we launched several important features.
More importantly, there’s also a lot of work in the background that’s not visible on the front end. We’ve become more ambitious at Rainmatter and we’ve increased our investments to support Indian founders building things for India. This has become all the more important given the current geopolitical environment, and we will continue to back more homegrown startups. It’s the same at Rainmatter Foundation as well. We continue to back individuals and organisations working on important issues and causes. We also set up a new Rs 100 crore rewilding fund and have taken up our first project in Maharashtra.
So, yeah, it’s been an interesting year, to say the least. As the old Chinese curse goes: “May you live in interesting times.”
Just about 10 days left to file your taxes. While figuring out taxation for trading and investments is usually a nightmare, we’ve made it super easy. I think our tax statements are easily the best in the industry by a mile.
On Console, you’ll find all the statements you need to file taxes for your trades and investments:
Tax P&L statement with trade-wise charges, turnover across all segments, equity and non-equity segregation, capital gains split for pre- and post-July 23, 2024, and more.
Ability to download one year of contract notes at a time. Full tradebooks.
Various filters to make it easy to figure out STCG (short-term capital gains) and LTCG (long-term capital gains).
And more…
If you need help filing your taxes, we’ve also partnered with Quicko to make the process even smoother.
📢We have an update for NRIs.
ICICI Bank is now among our partner banks for opening an NRE–PIS account and linking it to your Zerodha NRI account, along with HDFC Bank, IndusInd Bank, IDFC FIRST Bank, Yes Bank, and Axis Bank.
What’s a PIS account?
PIS (Portfolio Investment Scheme) is a bank-managed account that allows NRIs to buy and sell listed shares in India. The partner bank obtains the RBI PIS permission and routes all trades through this account.
Why does this matter?
Under RBI rules, NRIs can invest in Indian equities only through either the PIS route or a Non-PIS route. The PIS setup is needed if you want to use funds from your NRE account to invest in equities.
At Zerodha, we provide both options
PIS: Funded through your NRE or NRO account. Proceeds are fully repatriable (transferable overseas). Requires an account with one of our partner banks.
Non-PIS: Funded through your NRO account. Proceeds are non-repatriable beyond $1 million per year. Available with any bank, and this route comes with fewer restrictions and lower costs.
Learn more: https://support.zerodha.com/category/account-opening/nri-account-opening/pis-non-pis/articles/difference-between-pis-and-non-pis
You can open your NRI trading and demat account online.
Instant WhatsApp stock alerts, an investment ideas dashboard, a personalised investment timeline, custom sector indices, and multi-portfolio tracking.
Here’s a look at cool new features by Tijori.
Trading platforms are ridiculously complex. One hiccup anywhere from exchange connections to cloud servers can create an issue. Over the years, we’ve built tons of safeguards and redundancies, but we’re still paranoid.
Apart from all of this, we’ve built a new emergency trading mode using WhatsApp. In case of a disaster scenario, which we hope never happens, and the Kite web and mobile both become inaccessible during market hours, this backup mode will allow you to cancel orders and exit positions. It runs on a completely separate infrastructure and is designed to be independent of Kite. Link to the post.
Watch this video to know how to enable it.
One critical aspect of the brokerage business most people are unaware of is the sheer underlying complexity.
At a high level, we integrate with multiple stock exchanges, depositories, RTAs, banks, and others. Each of these integrations (hundreds of APIs and file exchanges) has been non-uniform and non-standard, resulting in massive amounts of technical and operational complexity. These are completely invisible to a broker’s clients.
A great example of quiet, systemic backend work yielding significant impact is the multi-year exercise SEBI undertook to standardise data exchange across market entities—the Unified Distilled File Formats (UDiFF).
The same data that was represented inconsistently across three exchanges, for instance, was unified to be consistent in a single format, across numerous data structures.
As a result of this, we ended up removing 60%+ of the code that was required to maintain these separate data formats, significantly reducing technical and operational complexity and risk.
Along with it, we saw huge efficiency gains. For instance, a nightly data import process went from taking 40 minutes to 30 seconds. Ultimately, this one SEBI project has cleared technical debt accrued over decades, significantly reducing technical and operational risk systemically in Indian capital markets.
These boring, invisible, background updates are often far more meaningful, impactful, and directly beneficial to retail clients than most shiny frontend features.
At Zerodha, we take technical and operational debt very seriously. Constantly reducing its buildup and giving these invisible improvements as much importance, if not more, as frontend features, is our engineering philosophy. Our priority is to make the underlying systems robust and reliable for the next decade, rather than focusing on what can be released in the next quarter.
The number of NRIs who want to invest in India but don’t because of the complex account opening process is quite high. NRI accounts are also much higher in value compared to resident Indian accounts, by at least 10 times.
Hardly a day goes by without emails or messages from NRIs asking us to make account opening easier at Zerodha. The paperwork today is onerous, especially the need to visit an embassy.
Recently, SEBI took a step in the right direction by removing the need for a CP (custodial participation code) to trade in F&O. So, we are reducing brokerage on all non-PIS accounts to Rs 50 or 0.5%, whichever is lower.
However, given the operational complexities, NRIs trading through PIS will continue to pay Rs 200 or 0.5%, whichever is lower.
We also just launched a new onboarding flow for NRIs, which simplifies the account opening process.
After 20+ years of being in the markets, one thing has become crystal clear to me: most investors should just invest in low-cost equity, debt, and gold index funds and do something useful with their lives. 😬 Trying to pick the “best fund” or “best asset class” is largely a waste of time and energy.
What most investors don’t realize is that they’d get far better returns by focusing on maximizing their earning potential rather than obsessing over picking the “best stocks and funds.” The odds are stacked against them anyway.
That’s exactly why we launched the ZerodhaAMC Multi Asset Fund. This single fund gives investors exposure to large-cap and mid-cap equities, government bonds, and gold all in one place. Investors don’t have to worry about rebalancing, tax complications, or managing multiple investments.
There was a famous study from Fidelity that found that their best-performing accounts belonged to people who were either dead or had forgotten they had accounts. The study was made up, but the point still stands.
Companies have started announcing results for the first quarter of FY 2025–26. Here are three simple ways to stay updated:
First, on Kite. If you’re tracking a stock in your Marketwatch or own it in your holdings, you’ll see an event tag when the results are close to being announced. Just tap the stock, go to the ‘Event’ tab in the Fundamentals widget, and you’ll get a quick snapshot, from valuations and revenue breakdowns to peer comparisons and shareholding patterns and more.
Second, check the Portfolio Timeline on Console, powered by Tijori. It’s like a live feed for your portfolio, showing earnings announcements, exchange filings, and other key updates about the companies you own.
Third, for broader coverage, follow @marketalertsz on X, where you get instant summaries of key exchange filings.
Interesting experiment by Elm Wealth: 118 finance students were given tomorrow’s WSJ front page 24 hours before the news broke. You’d expect easy profits. Instead, half lost money and 16% went completely bust.
It wasn’t because their predictions were wrong. They called market direction correctly 51.5% of the time. That’s better than chance.
The problem? Position sizing.
Many students bet huge portions of their portfolio on a single trade. Some used 20x, even 60x leverage. When they were right, they made money. But when they were wrong they blew up. All it took was a single misstep.
Meanwhile, five experienced traders ran the same simulation. Same info. Very different outcome: +130% average returns. Why? They knew how much to risk. They bet small when uncertain, and big only when the odds were clearly in their favor. That’s the art of position sizing.
Here’s the core lesson: Even if you could predict the future, it wouldn’t save you from poor risk management. Trading isn’t just about being right. It’s about surviving long enough to stay in the game.
Most retail traders obsess over predictions. But smart money obsesses over how much to bet when they think they’re right—and how to protect themselves when they’re wrong.
Because in the markets, being right means nothing if you go bust before you’re proven right.
Our support portal has a new look.
It’s now easier to navigate, and we’ve made several behind-the-scenes improvements to help you find what you’re looking for faster.
Did you know?
Our support portal includes over 1,300 articles that explain not only our products but also simplify other market and process-related topics for easy understanding.
Starting today, electricity futures are live for trading on Indian exchanges. MCX has started trading in these contracts from today, and NSE will start from Monday, July 14, 2025.
These contracts will trade from Monday to Friday, from 9:00 AM to 11:30 PM (11:55 PM during the U.S. daylight saving period, November to March).
Here’s a quick explainer on electric futures trading from today’s Daily Brief by
@zerodhamarkets👇
A futures contract lets you lock in a price today for electricity you plan to buy or sell later.
This gives power producers, distribution companies, and even speculators a new tool: the ability to secure a future power price, on a regulated exchange, without having to create or take delivery of that power.
Until now, most electricity in India was sold via long-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) between generators and discoms, covering the base demand through 5, 10, or 25-year contracts.
But demand and supply aren’t constant. Heatwaves, monsoon failures, or outages cause sudden spikes or drops. That’s where short-term markets like IEX’s day-ahead and real-time trading came in, allowing utilities to buy/sell electricity for immediate delivery.
However, those are physical markets. You’re actually buying electricity. The new electricity futures offered by MCX and NSE are purely financial contracts. No physical power changes hands. It’s a cash-settled bet on what power prices will be in a future month.
So, why aren’t electricity futures being offered on IEX, India’s biggest power exchange?
It comes down to regulation and who governs what. In India, physical power markets are regulated by CERC, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission. But derivatives are financial instruments. So they come under SEBI’s jurisdiction.
Since IEX is a CERC-regulated entity. It can’t offer SEBI-regulated financial products like futures. That space is reserved for SEBI-approved exchanges like NSE and MCX.
So, what’s the point of these contracts? At a basic level, it’s about hedging. Power generators can lock in future selling prices. Discoms can protect themselves against price spikes. Speculators can bet on market trends.
One of the biggest challenges in building a financial services business is that the incentives are often skewed toward doing what’s good for the business and not for the customer. It’s very hard to consistently put customers first.
This is one of the main reasons why finance apps are full of dark patterns, more than almost any other category. Dark patterns are design tricks used in apps and websites to make you do things that are not in your best interest. From pointless “gamification” and casino-like features to manipulative notifications, lack of transparency, and pushing harmful financial products, many platforms are, in some ways, incentivised to work against their own users.
“Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger
One reason Zerodha users trust us with their money is because we’ve avoided these practices from day one. Doing what’s right for our customers has always been at the heart of our philosophy.
Read this post for more.
We recently recorded a video breaking down the most common dark patterns in finance apps.
A year ago, we started The Daily Brief, a podcast simplifying 2-3 most interesting stories in finance, business, and the wider economy. Since then, it has quickly become one of India’s most popular podcasts, reaching over 50,000 people across video, audio, and text formats.
Here’s a quick note on what we’ve been up to.
We often hear stories from investors, on social media and in real life, about holding physical share certificates; even discovering ones that belonged to their parents or grandparents.
Today, SEBI no longer permits the transfer of physical shares, except in specific cases like inheritance. So, holding shares in demat form isn’t just more convenient and secure, it’s essential if you want to do anything with them.
We see this as a real issue and want to help. We’ve set up a dedicated team to assist with the dematerialisation process. You don’t need to be a Zerodha customer or even have an account with us; we’ll still help you convert your physical shares to demat. If you’re unsure how to start, just raise a ticket below.
The number of fraud cases involving scammers impersonating brokers and asking for money to be transferred to random accounts has skyrocketed.
To protect investors, SEBI has introduced a new UPI security feature. All legitimate fund transfers will now only go to verified UPI handles like: brokername@validbank (as shown in the image). We @zerodhaonline will implement this soon, and this should help reduce fraud incidents significantly.
~11% of all retail and HNI holdings are in Zerodha demat accounts. Grateful for the incredible trust our customers place in us.
190
Share
