The number is not a marketing exaggeration. It is the regulator’s own finding, replicated three times.
In September 2024, SEBI reported that 93% of individual traders in equity futures and options lost money over FY22 to FY24. The aggregate net loss was more than ₹1.81 lakh crore — roughly 22 billion US dollars — across 1.13 crore traders. The follow-up for FY25 was no kinder: the loss rate was still 91%, and net losses widened 41% to ₹1.05 lakh crore in a single year.
This is not a story about a few unlucky people. It is a story about a structural outcome. And structural outcomes have structural causes.
What the data actually says
Three SEBI studies tell a consistent story:
- January 2023: 89% of individual F&O traders lost money in FY22; among active traders, 90% lost, averaging ₹1.25 lakh in losses.
- July 2024: 7 out of 10 intraday equity traders lost money in FY23 — and the loss rate climbed to 76% for traders under 30.
- September 2024: 93% lost in F&O over FY22–FY24; the worst-hit 3.5% of loss-makers lost an average of ₹28 lakh each.
Two details matter more than the headline. First, more activity correlated with worse outcomes — the opposite of “practice makes perfect.” Second, costs alone were punishing: loss-making traders spent 28% of their net losses on transaction costs (brokerage, exchange fees, STT, GST) in FY24. You can lose money before you are even wrong about direction.
The cause is behaviour, and it is well-studied
When 9 in 10 people lose at the same activity, the explanation is not individual skill. It is shared psychology. The academic record on this is decades deep:
- The disposition effect. Investors sell winners too early and hold losers too long. Terrance Odean documented this in Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses? (1998), studying 10,000 brokerage accounts. SEBI’s own data echoes it: more than 75% of F&O traders kept trading even after consecutive losses.
- Overtrading. In Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth (2000), Barber and Odean showed the most active quintile of retail traders earned 11.4% a year against a market return of 17.9% — a 6.5 percentage point shortfall, driven almost entirely by trading costs and churn.
- Recency bias. Most Indian retail traders have only ever traded the post-2020 bull market. A strategy that “always works” has usually never been tested against 2008, 2011, 2018, or the March 2020 crash. Cognitive biases that destroy algo trading strategies covers this failure mode in more depth.
None of these are character flaws. They are defaults of the human mind under uncertainty and loss. Willpower does not fix them. Process does.
What changed in November 2024
In response to this data, SEBI tightened F&O rules starting 20 November 2024: the minimum index derivative contract value was raised from ₹5–10 lakh to ₹15 lakh, with the value reviewed periodically and kept within a ₹15–20 lakh band, and weekly expiries were restricted to one benchmark index per exchange. Both measures raise the cost of the same small-ticket, high-frequency trading the data above shows losing money.
What actually changes the odds
The single most effective intervention is boring: decide the rules before the money is at risk, and test them against history that includes the bad years.
A rule that is written down and backtested removes the moment-to-moment discretion where the disposition effect, recency bias, and FOMO do their damage. You are no longer asking “should I hold this loser and hope?” in the heat of a drawdown. You decided that on a calm afternoon, and you tested what it would have cost you.
This is not a promise of profit. It is the removal of the specific behaviours that the data shows destroy capital.
Where saral.money fits
saral.money is built around that one discipline. You compose a strategy as a visual pipeline: universe, filters, ranking, position sizing, output. The rules are explicit by construction. Before deploying anything, you backtest against 15+ years of NSE and BSE data on a survivorship-bias-free universe, so the equity curve you see includes 2018 and March 2020, not just the bull run.
The honest part: this does not guarantee you make money, and it cannot stop a determined person from trading badly. A backtest is a study of the past, not a forecast. What the platform does is force the evidence to exist before the decision — which is precisely the point where SEBI’s data shows retail goes wrong.
On scope: saral is built for systematic equity strategies — momentum, value, quality, multi-factor portfolios rebalanced over weeks and months. It is not an intraday options-punting tool. If the 93% statistic describes the game you are playing, the more useful question may be whether to play a different game entirely.
What to try next
Open a strategy in saral.money and backtest it against the Nifty 500 across 2010 to 2024. Look specifically at the max drawdown in 2018 and the COVID crash of March 2020 — the periods most retail traders have never sat through. If a strategy survives those years on paper, it has earned a closer look. If it collapses, you just learned that for free, instead of with capital.