India's F&O losses: ₹3.85 lakh crore in five years

Between April 2021 and March 2026, individual traders in India lost about ₹3.85 lakh crore trading futures and options (F&O).¹ That works out to roughly ₹210 crore every day for five years. The figure only counts clients of the 15 biggest brokers (the companies people use to trade), so the true total is higher.

The data comes from SEBI, India’s market regulator, which makes and enforces the rules for the stock market. SEBI studied the trading accounts of millions of people.

What is F&O?

Futures and options are contracts that let you bet on where a share or an index will go. A share is a small piece of a company, and shares are also called equity. An index, like the Nifty, tracks the share prices of a group of big companies. With F&O, you can make these bets without buying the shares themselves.

A small amount of money can control a large bet, so both gains and losses get bigger. Options in particular can cost very little, which makes them look like an easy way to make big money fast. The price of an option is called its premium. If the share or index does not move far enough your way before the option expires, you can lose the whole premium.

India took to F&O like nowhere else. By early 2024, about 84% of all equity options contracts traded anywhere in the world were traded in India.² The number of individual F&O traders rose from about 14 lakh in FY20 to 106 lakh in FY25.¹ In India, the financial year (FY) runs from April to March, so FY25 means April 2024 to March 2025.

How much traders lost, year by year

After brokerage, taxes and fees. Clients of the largest brokers, covering about 9 in 10 traders. The financial year runs April to March.Source: SEBI studies, September 2024 and August 2026

Losses were highest in FY25, at about ₹1.12 lakh crore.³ They fell to ₹91,685 crore in FY26, mainly because fewer people traded. That was the first drop in the five years SEBI has covered.

The percentage of traders who lose has not changed. Every year from FY22 to FY26, between 88% and 92% of individual F&O traders lost money.¹ Over any two- or three-year period that SEBI measured, only about 1 in 100 traders made a profit of more than ₹1 lakh. Since July 2023, brokers have had to warn clients at login that 9 out of 10 individual traders lose money,⁴ but people still trade.

Who is losing

The typical F&O trader today is young, earns little, and lives outside the big cities.

In FY26	Share of traders
Under 30 years old	43%
Income below ₹5 lakh a year	73%
Outside the top 30 cities	67%
Women	17%
Own no shares or equity funds	35%

Young people poured in. About 31% of traders were under 30 in FY22. By FY25, that figure was 45%. For many traders, F&O is their only contact with the stock market. More than a third held no shares or equity funds at all, and 78% held less than ₹1 lakh.¹

The losses also left little behind. SEBI looked at the people who lost money in F&O between FY22 and FY24, and at their stock holdings as of March 2026. For 77% of them, those holdings were worth less than a quarter of what they had lost. SEBI is careful to say this shows a link, not proof that one caused the other.¹

Why they lose

They buy cheap options, mostly on the last day

Almost all individual traders buy options rather than sell them. In FY26, 93% of traders only ever bought options, and 9 in 10 of them lost money.⁵ Options made up 92% of all losses by individual traders.¹

Most of this buying happens on expiry day, the last day of the contract. Options are cheapest then, because they have only hours left to pay off. At the peak in FY25, 70% of index options trading happened on expiry day.¹ SEBI has compared these cheap, short-lived options to a lottery ticket.⁶

Costs add up fast

On every trade, traders pay brokerage (the broker’s fee), stock exchange fees and GST. When they sell, they also pay securities transaction tax (STT). From FY22 to FY26, individual traders paid about ₹1 lakh crore in these costs.¹ In FY26 alone, 4.4 lakh traders had a profit before costs but a loss after paying them.

The other side is a professional

Before costs, F&O is close to a zero-sum game: one side’s gain is the other side’s loss.

Trading firms are proprietary traders, which trade their own money.Source: SEBI, August 2026

Trading firms here are companies that trade with their own money. In FY26, before costs, trading firms made a profit of ₹44,483 crore and foreign investors made ₹13,896 crore, while individuals lost ₹72,243 crore.¹ About 99% of the profits of trading firms and foreign investors went to those using algorithmic trading. In algorithmic trading, computer programs place the trades. Just 10 trading firms took three quarters of all trading-firm profits.

The best-known case is Jane Street, a US trading firm. In July 2025, SEBI passed an interim order alleging that the firm manipulated the Nifty and Bank Nifty on expiry days. SEBI says the firm did this to profit from its options bets. An interim order is a temporary order, made before the final decision in a case. SEBI impounded ₹4,843.57 crore, meaning the firm had to set that money aside. It deposited the money in an escrow account, a type of account that holds money until a dispute is settled. SEBI’s order says Jane Street made ₹36,502 crore of net profit in Indian markets between January 2023 and March 2025.⁷ Jane Street denies the allegations and has appealed. As of early September 2026, the case was still pending.⁸

They keep coming back

Losing does not make most people stop. Among traders who lost money two years in a row and kept trading, about 9 in 10 lost again the next year.⁵ Of those who traded in every year from FY22 to FY26, about 2 in 3 lost money every year. Only 1 in 200 made a profit every year.

What SEBI changed, and did it work?

Starting in November 2024, SEBI tightened the rules for index F&O.⁹

• The smallest contract you can trade used to be worth ₹5 to 10 lakh. SEBI raised this to ₹15 lakh, so each bet needs more money.
• Each stock exchange can offer weekly options on only one index. This cut the number of weekly expiry days.
• Option buyers must pay the full premium upfront.

The government also raised STT on F&O, first in October 2024 and again from April 2026.¹⁰

The rules cut the number of traders. The number of active individual traders fell 18%, from 106 lakh in FY25 to 87.5 lakh in FY26. It was the first yearly fall since FY16, and the number of new traders fell by about 40%.¹

But the people who stayed traded just as hard. The value of options premium traded rose 7% in FY26. By March 2026, average daily options trading was nearly double its level before the new rules. The average loss per trader also rose, to about ₹1.17 lakh. SEBI itself concluded that the rules reduced the number of people trading but did not change the basic way they trade.¹

Footnotes

1. SEBI, Study: Profitability of Individual Traders in the Equity Derivatives Segment, FY25 to FY26, 20 August 2026, and SEBI, Study: Analysis of Profits and Losses in the Equity Derivatives Segment, FY22 to FY24, 23 September 2024. Loss figures cover clients of the largest brokers (about 9 in 10 traders); SEBI suggests whole-market figures would be about 11% higher. The ₹210 crore a day is my arithmetic: ₹3,84,856 crore over the 1,826 days from April 2021 to March 2026. The FY20 trader count is read from a SEBI chart. Income data covers about 55% of FY26 traders. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. FIA, Premium turnover in Indian options hits $150 billion, 14 May 2024. Contracts in India are small, so India’s share by value is much lower than its share by number of contracts. ↩

3. SEBI’s revised FY25 figure from its August 2026 study is ₹1,11,788 crore. Its July 2025 study reported ₹1,05,603 crore from a smaller sample of 13 brokers. ↩

4. SEBI, Risk disclosure with respect to trading by individual traders in the equity F&O segment, circular of 19 May 2023, effective 1 July 2023. ↩

5. SEBI, Study: Trading Behaviour of Individual Traders in the Equity Derivatives Segment, FY25 to FY26, 20 August 2026. The share of option buyers who lost comes from SEBI’s random sample of 5,050 traders. ↩ ↩²

6. SEBI, Consultation paper on measures to strengthen the index derivatives framework, 30 July 2024. ↩

7. SEBI, Interim order in the matter of index manipulation by Jane Street Group, 3 July 2025, and SEBI press release on escrow compliance, 14 July 2025. The ₹36,502 crore is net profit across all segments, including ₹43,289 crore from index options. These are SEBI’s allegations in an interim order. ↩

8. Reuters, US trading firm Jane Street files appeal, 3 September 2025; Mint, Jane Street vs SEBI, redux, 4 September 2026, which lists the next tribunal hearing for 5 October 2026. ↩

9. SEBI, Measures to strengthen the equity index derivatives framework, circular of 1 October 2024. The measures were phased in between November 2024 and April 2025. ↩

10. Union Budget 2024-25 and Union Budget 2026-27 speeches. STT on options rose to 0.1% of the premium from October 2024 and to 0.15% from April 2026. ↩