Does losing money in Derivative Trading truly equate to "paying for experience"?

[pavinjoseph]

@zetex

Personally, I believe yes experience pays off but paying off doesn’t mean you turn profitable just because of experience.

Well said. Experience alone wasn’t a factor in being profitable according to the recent SEBI study on retail losses in derivatives market.

@Adarsh_Patil

Experience didn’t necessarily make traders better

This is perhaps one of the more surprising findings.

Among traders with one consecutive year of participation, around 91% were loss-makers. This increased to 94.4% after two years, 96% after three years and 96.5% after four years. Even among traders with five consecutive years of participation, around 95.3% had a cumulative loss.

Simply spending more years in the market didn’t translate into better outcomes in this dataset.

The report also found that among traders who had incurred losses in each of the previous two years and continued trading, around 90–92% lost money again in the following year. Among traders active throughout FY22–FY26, only 0.5% were profitable in all five years, while 65.6% incurred losses in every year.