From 2021, I had been tweeting about the risks to the broking business, but somehow I kept getting surprised on the upside. But starting around October last year, all the risks I was thinking about crystallised. First came the STT increase on options, then the removal of exchange transaction charge rebates, and a reduction in weekly expiries. In addition to this, there was a significant decline in market activity. Due to all these factors, our revenues and profits suffered a decline. This year, we are seeing a drop in broking revenues of about ~40%.

Having said that, I’ve never looked at quarterly or even yearly growth because Zerodha is perhaps the only broker in the world with the luxury of thinking long-term and continuing to do what’s right for our customers despite short-term business volatility. This is in large part because we don’t have any external investors or pressures to answer to.

Despite the financial headwinds, the last year was also a good year in a lot of ways. In terms of products, we launched several important features.

More importantly, there’s also a lot of work in the background that’s not visible on the front end. We’ve become more ambitious at Rainmatter and we’ve increased our investments to support Indian founders building things for India. This has become all the more important given the current geopolitical environment, and we will continue to back more homegrown startups. It’s the same at Rainmatter Foundation as well. We continue to back individuals and organisations working on important issues and causes. We also set up a new Rs 100 crore rewilding fund and have taken up our first project in Maharashtra.

So, yeah, it’s been an interesting year, to say the least. As the old Chinese curse goes: “May you live in interesting times.”

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