Despite what people think about F&O trading in India and all its problems, it is still a very, very small market compared to almost anything else. In fact, in the month of March, only about 30 lakh people traded an F&O contract. Across FY26 as a whole, only about 20 lakh people traded only in F&O. If you combine people who traded in equities and F&O, that number goes up to roughly 64 lakh.

So this is still a very small market. Altogether, out of nearly 13 crore unique investors, only around 3.8 crore investors were active across cash and F&O. That means only about 30% of investors traded anything at all.

And yet, the only reason broker revenues have held up is that a small number of people are trading more. Pretty much the entire revenue pool of the broking industry comes from this relatively small pool of traders.

If you look at F&O turnover, around 60–70% of trading volumes come from a tiny set of investors, roughly just 1–2%. That is the lopsided structure of the Indian markets.

Read the post.

Go to link →