Despite what people think about F&O trading in India and all its problems, it is still a very, very small market compared to almost anything else. In fact, in the month of March, only about 30 lakh people traded an F&O contract. Across FY26 as a whole, only about 20 lakh people traded only in F&O. If you combine people who traded in equities and F&O, that number goes up to roughly 64 lakh.
So this is still a very small market. Altogether, out of nearly 13 crore unique investors, only around 3.8 crore investors were active across cash and F&O. That means only about 30% of investors traded anything at all.
And yet, the only reason broker revenues have held up is that a small number of people are trading more. Pretty much the entire revenue pool of the broking industry comes from this relatively small pool of traders.
If you look at F&O turnover, around 60–70% of trading volumes come from a tiny set of investors, roughly just 1–2%. That is the lopsided structure of the Indian markets.
What followed was probably one of the greatest speculative episodes Indian markets have seen. But this was not just an Indian phenomenon. The surface area of speculation expanded globally.
…and from the summary of the linked article,
This is a retail investor protection problem, worth taking seriously, worth addressing carefully, and worth building a proper suitability framework for. It is not evidence of a runaway speculative market that dwarfs global peers.
But, was it a runaway speculative market successfully nipped in the bud ?
(without attempting to compare it with global peers)
STT is an absolute killer now, the charges are too high, it should be abolished, don’t know why it exists at all but nobody cares about it. It makes intraday trading not viable at all, lot of slippages now , futures is practically dead. God i hate this idiotic government, they keep on looting people, no logical sense as to why to have numerous charges on FNO transactions.
Yeah, explosive activity happened in options, but they punished futures much more to the point that intraday is not viable. Most active futures traders will have to move to options.
4x increase in STT in couple of years. I have no interest in stock/index futures now.
Some suspect its due to the Adani Fall. There is likely a link between the govt and them, looking at how the propaganda machine started in full swing in initial days of fall.
We can be generous and say its to avoid similar bear attacks across companies.
