Why 9 in 10 Traders Lose Money in India
June 29, 2026 · ~9 min read · by Shivam Kushwaha, HeyArtha founder
It's 3:31pm, one minute after the market closes, and I'm staring at a number that's red no matter how I look at it. Down four thousand today. This week, down almost eleven. My friend Rohit sends a screenshot in our trading group, a green candle, a small win, "finally," he writes. I don't reply right away. I just sit there doing the math I do most evenings now, how many weeks of tuition, how many months of rent, how many things I could have just bought instead of watching them disappear into a chart. Nobody in that group has posted a red screenshot in months. Which is strange, because statistically, almost all of us should be.
Why Almost Everyone Who Trades Ends Up Losing Money
Most individual traders in India's futures and options segment lose money, and my reading is that costs and the structure of the game work against many of the people playing it, not that they're worse at it than the people who seem to be winning. According to SEBI's own study, 93% of individual traders in India's equity derivatives segment lost money between FY22 and FY24, with aggregate losses crossing ₹1.8 lakh crore over those three years. A follow-up study in July 2025 found the number had barely moved: over 91% of individual traders still lost money in FY25, and the net loss widened to ₹1,05,603 crore, up 41% from the year before. SEBI's latest study, published in August 2026, found that 87.7% of individual traders lost money in FY26, down from 90.9% in FY25, with aggregate net losses of ₹91,685 crore, down 18% from a revised ₹1.12 lakh crore for FY25. Fewer people traded, but those who did lost more on average.
Sit with that for a second. Close to nine out of ten. Not just the unlucky ones, not just the beginners, close to nine out of every ten individual traders in India's futures and options segment. And yet scroll through any trading Telegram group, any finance page's comment section, any college WhatsApp group where three guys got into options last year, and you'd never guess it. Everyone's chart is green. Everyone's "up big this month." Somebody's always about to hit their target and quit their job. If you're the one quietly closing the app after another red day, it's easy to start believing you're the exception, the one person who's bad at this, alone in a losing streak nobody else seems to be posting about, when the actual exception is whoever's been consistently green.
Why This Statistic Doesn't Feel Real Until It's You
Part of this is just what gets shared and what doesn't. Nobody screenshots a ₹40,000 loss and posts it with a caption. People screenshot wins, near-misses that turned into wins, the one green week in a string of red ones. So the version of trading you see on your feed is a filtered, survivorship-biased highlight reel, and your own actual experience, with all its red days included, gets measured against that fake baseline instead of the real one.
Then there's the app itself, which in my view is built to keep you engaged more than to protect your money. The colors, the streaks, the notification that pings when a stock you're watching moves, the option chain that makes complex risk look like a simple grid you can just tap. A trade that almost hit target before reversing can feel a lot like a near-win, and in my view that is similar to what keeps people pulling a slot machine long after the math has stopped making sense. It is part of why the line between trading and gambling gets so blurry for a lot of people without them noticing. You're not weak-willed for feeling pulled back in after a loss. The product is designed to hold your attention.
And there's a very Indian layer on top of all this too. Trading gets talked about at home like it's a side hustle, a smart use of your salary, something uncles discuss over chai like it's basically a savings account with better returns. Nobody's uncle mentions the 88%.
Why "I'll Stop Once I'm Even" Never Actually Works
Almost every trader who's been at this a while has said some version of this sentence to themselves: I'll stop, or at least take a proper break, once I'm back to breakeven. It sounds reasonable. It almost never plays out that way.
The problem is that "getting back to even" isn't a real trading strategy, it's an emotional finish line dressed up as a plan. Once you've decided you need to reach a specific number before you're allowed to stop, every trade after that stops being about the setup in front of you and starts being about closing the gap. That's a subtly different, much riskier way to trade, and it tends to produce exactly the kind of oversized, badly timed positions that dig the hole deeper instead of filling it in.
There's also a quieter cost to this pattern that has nothing to do with money. Chasing breakeven means you never actually get to the reflection part, the honest look at what went wrong, because you're too busy trying to erase the evidence that it went wrong at all. Some of the traders I've heard from through Artha have been "one good trade away from even" for months. Not because they're bad at trading. Because the goalpost keeps moving every time a new loss gets added to the total that needs erasing.
If any part of that sounds familiar, it's worth asking a harder question than "how do I get back to even." Something closer to: what would actually need to be true for me to feel okay stopping, even at a loss.
What Actually Helps When the Losses Pile Up
This isn't a piece about entry points or stop-losses, that's not what Artha is for, and honestly it's not something I'd claim to know. What actually seems to help, from every conversation I've had with people going through this, is dealing with what the losing is doing to you, separate from what to do about the money itself.
Talking to your trading group about it rarely helps the way you'd hope. Most trading communities, even well-meaning ones, run on a kind of unspoken agreement to keep the mood upbeat, so a genuine "I'm down badly and it's messing with my head" post tends to get a few generic "market's tough right now" replies and then gets buried under the next green screenshot. It's not that people don't care. It's that the group's whole culture makes honesty about losing feel like breaking character, which is a big part of why trading can feel so lonely even when you're surrounded by other traders.
Journaling your trades can genuinely help you notice patterns, chasing a loss with a bigger, riskier trade to try to win it back, sizing up too fast after a bad week. But for some people it turns into a private ledger of failure they reread at 1am, which does the opposite of what it's meant to do. Worth trying, worth dropping if it starts to feel like that.
Therapy is worth it if the losses are tangled up with something bigger, borrowed money, hiding the numbers from family, trouble sleeping, the trading taking over more of your day than you're comfortable admitting. A lot of people wait far too long to consider this because "I'm stressed about my trades" sounds too small a reason to book a session, compared to what people usually associate therapy with. It isn't too small.
What tends to help fastest, honestly, is just saying the real number out loud to someone who isn't going to either panic or minimize it. Not "the market's been rough." The actual number, and the actual feeling underneath it, said to someone with zero stake in whether you keep trading or quit tomorrow. That's a very different conversation than the one happening in your trading group, and it's usually the one that's harder to have with the people closest to you.
There's a reason that last part matters more than it sounds like it should. The people who know you best, family, close friends, are also the people with the most riding on your answer, whether that's worry about the money, disappointment, or just discomfort with a version of you that's struggling instead of winning. A stranger doesn't carry any of that. They can just listen to the number and the feeling without it becoming about them too, which is often exactly what makes the difference between a conversation that helps and one that quietly makes things heavier.
Why I Built a Room for This Exact Conversation
I'm not a trader myself, my thing is CA prep and trading psychology. The pattern that kept showing up was this exact loop: winning gets celebrated everywhere, losing gets said to nobody.
Close to nine out of ten isn't a personal failing, it's just the number. What would it change if you stopped measuring your trading against the version of it that only exists on other people's screens?
Quick answers
Things people usually want to know.
Why do most people lose money trading in India?
SEBI's studies show that most individual traders in the F&O segment lose money in a given year: about 91 percent in FY25 and about 88 percent in FY26. Costs, the dominance of options and the highlight reel you see online all play a part, so losing is closer to the norm than the exception.
What percentage of traders actually lose money in India?
SEBI found 93 percent of individual traders lost money in equity derivatives between FY22 and FY24. For FY26 its August 2026 study put the share of loss-making individuals at 87.7 percent, down from 90.9 percent in FY25. These figures cover F&O traders, not all investors.
Is it normal to feel ashamed about losing money trading?
Yes, and it is made worse by the fact that few people post their losses, so it can feel as if everyone else is winning even though SEBI's data shows most individual F&O traders lose. The shame often comes from a comparison that was never fair.
Why does everyone in my trading group seem to be winning?
People tend to share wins and near-wins rather than losses, so a group's visible feed skews more positive than its collective results. Quiet members and those who have stopped trading are often invisible.
Is losing money trading a sign that I'm bad at it?
Not necessarily. Given SEBI's finding that nearly nine in ten individual F&O traders lose money in a year, losing puts you in the statistical majority, not a personal category of failure. That said, if you are losing repeatedly it is worth reviewing your process and costs.
How do I stop feeling addicted to checking my trades?
Start by naming what is happening. Rapid price updates and uncertain outcomes can make checking feel compulsive, so the pull is not simply a willpower problem. Turning off notifications and setting fixed times to look can help. If you cannot stop, speak to a mental health professional.
Should I quit trading if I keep losing money?
That is a personal financial decision worth thinking through carefully, ideally with someone who understands your full situation, and a blog article cannot responsibly make it for you. What can help regardless is having someone honest to talk to about how the losing is affecting you.
Why is it easier to talk about wins than losses in trading?
Trading culture, online and in person, tends to reward confidence and punish anything that looks like doubt, so admitting a loss can feel like admitting weakness even though losses are a normal part of how the odds work. This is an observation rather than a study.
Does everyone who trades eventually lose money?
No. In SEBI's FY26 study about 12 percent of individual traders made net profits, and about 23 percent of traders accounted for nearly 90 percent of total losses. But the large majority lose in any given year, so consistent profit is the exception rather than the baseline to expect.
How do I talk to my family about losing money trading?
Start with the number itself rather than easing into it, since vague framing tends to create more worry. Being specific about what happened and what you are doing about it usually lands better than hiding it or downplaying it.
Is it okay to talk to a stranger about my trading losses?
Yes, and for many people it is easier than talking to friends who trade, since a stranger has no stake in the outcome. A counsellor or a peer space such as Artha's Traders' Talk room are examples of places to do it.
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