Why 90% of F&O Traders Lose Money in India (What SEBI's Data Actually Shows)

There's a number every Indian trader should sit with. According to the Securities and Exchange Board of India's updated study, 93% of individual traders lost money in equity Futures & Options between FY22 and FY24 — collectively losing more than ₹1.8 lakh crore over those three years. In FY24 alone, around 91% of individual F&O traders — roughly 73 lakh people — were in the red.

This isn't a scare statistic to put you off trading. It's a map. Because the losses aren't evenly spread bad luck — they cluster around a handful of causes, and almost all of them are about process, not prediction.

Why the losses happen

Leverage cuts both ways. F&O lets you control large positions with small capital. That magnifies gains and losses equally — and most retail traders feel the second half of that sentence the hard way.

Costs quietly eat the edge. Brokerage, STT, exchange fees, GST and stamp duty add up fast in F&O. A strategy that looks break-even on price is often negative after costs — and many traders never measure their net number.

There's no edge, just activity. A lot of trading is reaction: a move is already running, you jump in, you're already late. Without a tested edge and a plan, you're not trading a system — you're guessing with real money.

The pros are playing a different game. SEBI's data shows most of the profits went to large entities using algorithms — the overwhelming majority of proprietary and foreign-investor profits came from algo trading. The retail trader clicking buttons on impulse is on the other side of that.

The stat that should change how you trade

Here's the most revealing finding: over 75% of the traders who lost money kept trading anyway, even after two consecutive losing years. That's not a market problem. That's a feedback-loop problem. They never had a system that forced them to see what was actually happening — which trades were planned versus impulsive, which strategies leaked money, where the same mistake repeated. Without that mirror, you can lose for years and never learn why.

What the profitable minority do differently

The roughly 7% who come out ahead aren't psychic. Across the research and the trading literature, the patterns that separate them are unglamorous and repeatable:

• →They plan before they trade. Entry, stop, target, size — decided when calm, not in the heat of a moving market.
• →They risk small per trade. They size positions so no single trade can do real damage.
• →They measure net, not gross. They know their numbers after all costs, not the comforting pre-cost version.
• →They review. They look back honestly — which setups work, which emotions cost them, what they repeat — and they adjust.

None of that requires a better prediction. It requires a process and a feedback loop. The reason most traders never build one is friction: it's tedious to track by hand, so they don't, so they never see the pattern, so it repeats. The traders who break the cycle almost always use something that makes the process automatic.

A journal won't make you profitable on its own — nothing can promise that, and anyone who does is selling something. But trading without a record of your decisions is exactly the blind spot SEBI's data describes. The 93% are, overwhelmingly, trading without a mirror.

Educational content only, not investment advice. F&O trading involves substantial risk of loss. Figures are from SEBI's published study covering FY22–FY24.