https://nithinkamath.me/Recent content on Nithin Kamath's personal homepageHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usTue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-first-time-we-appeared-in-the-press/Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-first-time-we-appeared-in-the-press/The first time we appeared in the press was 15 years ago, on September 5th. I first spoke to Nikhil Walavalkar as Sachin, my pseudonym for speaking to clients during sales calls. You didn’t want the CEO making sales calls. 😬 By the way, I’ve even met customers pretending to be Sachin in the early days of Zerodha. Anyway, one day I got a call and picked it up as Sachin.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-ipo-boom-and-the-odds-of-making-listing-gains/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-ipo-boom-and-the-odds-of-making-listing-gains/While the broader markets have gone nowhere, the primary market (IPOs, OFS, and FPOs) is red hot. By capital raised, this year is already on track to match, if not surpass, the last two years. And there’s a big pipeline of IPOs coming up. Even at Zerodha, there’s been a big spike in IPO applications, including people opening accounts just to apply. If you’re hoping to make easy money from IPOs, the second chart should give you some sense of the odds.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/account-maintenance-charges-at-zerodha/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/account-maintenance-charges-at-zerodha/A friend asked me if Zerodha charges AMC (Account Maintenance Charges). (Yes, I still get these messages😛). Of Zerodha’s ~2 crore clients, only about around 40% of clients paid AMC during the year. So 60% of our customers don’t pay any AMC because the holdings value of these accounts falls within the BSDA limit. Accounts with holdings less than ₹4 lakh qualify as a Basic Services Demat Account (BSDA). There’s no AMC on a BSDA as long as you only have one demat.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/16-years-of-zerodha/Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/16-years-of-zerodha/Zerodha turned 16 this month. Sweet 16. Every year, I write a letter to all our customers about what’s happening in the business and how we are thinking about the future. The last couple of years have been mixed for brokers. We had to take revenue hits because of regulatory changes, and then the Indian market peaked in September 2024. Volumes steadily declined after that, and growth has been muted, to say the least.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/health-insurance-checklist-for-parents/Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/health-insurance-checklist-for-parents/One of the most basic steps in personal finance is making sure you and your family have adequate health insurance. This is especially important for parents, many of whom bought policies years ago and have kept renewing them even as hospital costs have gone up significantly. Ditto has put together a simple checklist to help you review your parents’ health insurance and figure out whether the cover they have today is actually adequate.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/intermission-by-the-ken-story-of-itc/Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/intermission-by-the-ken-story-of-itc/The fact that ITC started diversifying away from its main tobacco business into hotels and other businesses after almost 70 years of existence was an immense feat of foresight. Especially considering ITC was never a founder-driven company. They knew tobacco was extremely harmful to health and addictive. When something is bad for people but difficult to ban outright, governments invariably keep regulating and taxing it more. Over time, the taxes become so high and the revenues so significant that the government itself ends up in a strange place: ban it or continue taxing it?https://nithinkamath.me/blog/answering-questions-about-zerodhas-approach-to-fo-and-mtf/Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/answering-questions-about-zerodhas-approach-to-fo-and-mtf/This discussion on Tradingqna started with a question about retail participation in derivatives, why F&O volumes are falling, and how we are thinking about business diversification. This then became a philosophical discussion about why we offer F&O and MTF, and whether we are compromising on our values by offering products like MTF. These are questions I get asked often: “You keep speaking about the philosophies of Zerodha, how you guys give back, etc.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/what-will-the-future-of-investing-and-trading-look-like/Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/what-will-the-future-of-investing-and-trading-look-like/If you think about it, trading and investing have changed a lot on the surface, but the fundamental act has remained more or less the same. Platforms look better. They are easier to use. There is more information, more data, more products, and far better tools. But underneath all of that, you still place an order through a broker, which then goes to an exchange. The question we keep asking ourselves at Zerodha and Rainmatter is: will this remain true in the future?https://nithinkamath.me/blog/making-it-easier-for-nris-to-invest-in-india/Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/making-it-easier-for-nris-to-invest-in-india/I’ve spoken many times about the need to make it easier for NRIs to invest in India. Finally, some great news. SEBI just released a consultation paper proposing a fully digital onboarding process for NRIs, without needing them to be physically present in India! Kudos to SEBI for this pragmatic move. This is huge because NRIs tend to have large amounts of capital to invest and are a highly durable source of inflows into Indian markets.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-back-office-with-venu-madhav/Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-back-office-with-venu-madhav/I still wonder what made Venu Madhav call me back in 2006 to ask, “Is there something I can do?” At the time, there was zero line of sight, I couldn’t even guarantee him a monthly salary. Yet he walked away from a stable, well-paying job at HP to join me back when I was just a sub-broker at Reliance Money😬 Zerodha wouldn’t be Zerodha today without him running pretty much all of our operations, compliance, and more over the years.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/ai-is-no-longer-a-differentiator/Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/ai-is-no-longer-a-differentiator/The number of investment decks I get leading with “we use AI” is ridiculous. It’s reached a point where it automatically makes my eyes roll, and I’ve almost stopped looking at them. Founders need to realize that AI is just table stakes now. Bragging that your product uses AI is like bragging that you take a bath every day. It’s not a differentiator. In fact, opening your pitch with it is a surefire way to get ignored, not just by us, but by most serious VCs.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/rainmatter-originals-story-of-akshayakalpa/Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/rainmatter-originals-story-of-akshayakalpa/What this country needs is more businesses that try to do more than just business, businesses that give back to the communities and ecosystems they depend on. In that sense, we need more businesses that don’t just take value from the system, but actively put value back into it. Akshayakalpa is one of them, and that’s one of the reasons we invested. Shashi and the team are building a business for profit, of course, but profit isn’t the only motivation.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/making-fitness-more-participatory-with-peakst8/Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/making-fitness-more-participatory-with-peakst8/Given my passion for all things health, I keep getting into all sorts of activities that I probably shouldn’t, considering my age. Yesterday, the team and I were trying a new hybrid fitness format called No Parking. It wasn’t as challenging as Hyrox, but it definitely wasn’t a cakewalk either. My heart rate shot up quickly with push-ups, rowing, sit-ups, and mountain climbers, while my teammate Deepak did all the activities that involved running😄https://nithinkamath.me/blog/to-run-a-brokerage-firm-is-to-live-with-contradictions/Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/to-run-a-brokerage-firm-is-to-live-with-contradictions/To run a brokerage firm is to live with contradictions. Especially if you have a fine-tuned moral and ethical compass.😬 By far the biggest contradiction I live with is around leverage. I was thinking about this because Mridul Arora asked me about it recently, and I couldn’t answer it as well as I wanted to on the spot. For years, I’ve spoken about the dangers of leverage. Yet we’re probably one of the businesses that has benefited the most from it, whether through intraday trading, F&O, or now MTF.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/problem-with-borrowing-for-lifestyle-spending/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/problem-with-borrowing-for-lifestyle-spending/Taking a loan has never been easier. There is almost no friction between wanting something and borrowing to pay for it. The problem is that income is limited, while the list of things we want is endless. And often, it isn’t even the purchase we want as much as the momentary thrill of buying it. We are taught how to earn and save, but learning how to spend is just as important.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introducing-all-new-sip-flow-on-kite-web/Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introducing-all-new-sip-flow-on-kite-web/A lot of Zerodha customers don’t know that you can set up SIPs for stocks and ETFs, just like mutual funds. SIPs are probably the easiest way to bring some discipline to investing. We’ve had Stock SIPs on Kite for a while, but the process of setting one up could have been better. We’ve now introduced an all-new Stock SIP flow on Kite web. You can add stocks or ETFs while creating an SIP, choose between quantity-based and amount-based SIPs, and allocate the investment amount across multiple stocks or ETFs.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-untold-stories-of-indias-medal-winners/Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-untold-stories-of-indias-medal-winners/This year, India finished 4th in the medal rankings at the Commonwealth Games, winning 39 medals. That’s a big deal. But what’s even more inspiring are the life stories of the athletes who won those medals. Arshi Yasin from The Bridge sent me some of their stories, and they are incredible. Reading about the backgrounds these athletes come from, the adversity they had to face to get to where they are, is incredible.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/thoughts-on-cas-and-what-we-can-do-better/Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/thoughts-on-cas-and-what-we-can-do-better/There has been a lot of discussion about the sharp closing moves since the new Closing Auction Session went live. CAS itself is not a bad idea. Most large global markets have some form of closing auction. A large amount of institutional activity, especially from passive funds and other benchmark-tracking investors, happens near the close. Instead of the closing price being determined based on the average traded price during the final 30 minutes, CAS brings these orders together in an auction to discover one closing price.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/helping-young-people-understand-money-with-varsity-tribe/Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/helping-young-people-understand-money-with-varsity-tribe/The most exciting thing about Varsity Tribe is that it’s building a community of young people who are curious about money, saving, investing, trading, and building wealth. Financial literacy is one of the most important life skills, yet it’s rarely taught. If more youngsters understand how money works early in life, they’re far better equipped to make smarter decisions, build wealth, and even take the leap into entrepreneurship.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/in-the-money-podcast-with-jack-schwager/Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/in-the-money-podcast-with-jack-schwager/8 years back, I spoke to Jack Schwager, the man behind the Market Wizards series. Sandeep Rao spoke to him again recently on In The Money, and it was an interesting conversation. Market Wizards is probably the only book I’ve read multiple times when I was trading actively. The one thing that stood out to me from the video was the debate between systematic vs. discretionary trading. There’s a common assumption that the best traders are rules-based, meaning they follow a fixed set of rules.