For retail investors, I guess the only material change in the budget is for people who invest in international stocks. Money sent out using LRS now has a Tax Collection at Source (TCS) of 20% with no upper or lower threshold, compared to 5% over Rs 7lks earlier.

TCS can be claimed after filing income tax returns at the end of the year, but it’s unlikely that many will be okay with having 20% of capital blocked until then.

This will adversely affect all platforms offering international stocks and international crypto exchanges.

It doesn’t affect us at Zerodha, since we didn’t offer international stock investing due to the uncertainty around regulations & high remittance costs. There was also the question of scale, given that Govt ideally wouldn’t want money moving abroad.

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