https://nithinkamath.me/Recent content on Nithin Kamath's personal homepageHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usTue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/its-never-too-early-to-start-investing/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/its-never-too-early-to-start-investing/Our youngest customer is just 28 days old. The parents opened a Zerodha minor account, and a week later, they made the first investment.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-back-office-with-shoaib/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-back-office-with-shoaib/One lesser-known thing about Zerodha is that almost everyone in leadership today has grown from within the organisation. We have rarely hired anyone from outside for leadership roles. For most people here, Zerodha was their first or second job, and we don’t really have anyone with a pedigree education either. Shoaib is a good example. He started as a support agent, went on to head account opening, and eventually became our head of HR.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/solving-indias-water-crisis-starts-with-knowing-the-problem/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/solving-indias-water-crisis-starts-with-knowing-the-problem/Water is probably the thing we take most for granted, and it is going to become one of the defining issues of our times. As climate change worsens, we are going to see more erratic monsoon patterns, and that will only exacerbate an already difficult problem. A lot of India is already under water stress. In places like Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi, we are simply extracting more groundwater every year than is being replenished.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/regulation-can-change-the-economics-of-a-business-overnight/Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/regulation-can-change-the-economics-of-a-business-overnight/I keep saying this: for any regulated business, the biggest risk is regulatory risk. Today’s IRDAI draft on insurance commissions is a good reminder. Broking is no different. A change in rules around retail F&O trading, how brokers can earn on client float, MTF requirements, or any of several other areas can change the economics of the business almost overnight. So when valuing regulated businesses, you can’t just extrapolate current revenues and profits into the future.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/coming-soon-nudge-v2/Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/coming-soon-nudge-v2/Coming soon: Nudge v2 will do more than just warnings, allowing you to set hard limits to stay disciplined.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/opening-an-account-is-easy-closing-it-should-be-too/Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/opening-an-account-is-easy-closing-it-should-be-too/People need to be able to close an account as easily as they open one, if not easier. Making it easy to open an account but impossible to close one is the oldest dark pattern in the book. I think we are one of the few apps where the account closure option is clearly visible. We at Zerodha close around 15,000 to 20,000 accounts every month for reasons ranging from company policies and trading losses to moving to another broker.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/thoughts-on-mdr-for-upi-transactions/Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/thoughts-on-mdr-for-upi-transactions/I think MDR on UPI was probably inevitable at some point, especially given how widespread UPI adoption has become. It could also lead to more competition, instead of just three apps accounting for more than 95% of the market. That being said, there are some use cases, like investing and broking, where the proposed MDR structure doesn’t really make sense. The problem with broking is that there is no guarantee that money transferred to a broker will actually result in a transaction.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/n-finance-boring-is-usually-better/Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/n-finance-boring-is-usually-better/The fancier a financial product looks, the bigger the catch usually is. Prateek Singh and Zero1 do a nice job explaining this using leasing vs buying a car. A lower monthly payment can make leasing look like an obvious deal, but once you account for upfront costs, restrictions, and what you actually own at the end, the math looks very different. I think this is true for most financial products. If it takes more than two sentences to explain how a product makes money and where the risk sits, you should probably stay away.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/rainmatter-originals-story-of-hasiru-dala-innovations-carbon-masters/Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/rainmatter-originals-story-of-hasiru-dala-innovations-carbon-masters/Bangalore produces around 7,000 tonnes of waste a day, roughly 3,000 tonnes of that is wet waste. All of it has to be collected, segregated, and processed every single day. A lot of it still ends up badly treated or in a landfill. We got to know the Hasiru Dala Innovations team a few years ago. They’ve spent years doing the thankless part of this, collecting and segregating waste at scale.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-role-nse-played-in-zerodhas-early-days/Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-role-nse-played-in-zerodhas-early-days/Back in 2010, one of the reasons we even considered becoming a brokerage firm was because of NSE NOW. It was a free trading platform provided by the NSE that brokers could offer to their clients. While we were starting out, I had heard a lot of scary stories about the exchanges, but our experience was the total opposite. When we went to Chennai to inquire about a membership, they were incredibly welcoming.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/is-ai-making-us-less-intelligent/Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/is-ai-making-us-less-intelligent/The OECD conducts an assessment called PISA that measures the reading, science, and maths skills of 15-year-olds. The latest results are quite dismal. Across much of the world, kids are getting worse at reading and maths, and the decline isn’t small. COVID probably explains some of this, but there seems to be a longer-term trend at play. And now there’s AI. I can see a lot of this in myself. Pretty much every post I write now goes through ChatGPT, Claude, etc.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introducing-trading-from-chart-tfc-on-the-kite-app/Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introducing-trading-from-chart-tfc-on-the-kite-app/Around 80% of our orders come from mobile. Personally, I still don’t understand how people manage to trade intraday from a phone. 🙂 That said, Trade from Charts (TFC) on mobile has been one of the most requested features. It’s now available on TradingView charts on Kite. With TFC, you can place orders, drag to modify pending orders, and track open positions directly on the chart. Watch this video for more.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introducing-4th-cross-labs-our-open-source-hacker-collective/Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introducing-4th-cross-labs-our-open-source-hacker-collective/Our tech team has formed a nice collective that builds and maintains open-source software for public good. The “collective” is just the latest avatar of what we’ve been doing from day one. Over the years, we’ve built and open-sourced tools that are today used by everyone from governments to large companies. I don’t think there’s another company with such a small tech team (~35 people) that has shipped so many side projects that are now world-class, enterprise-grade open-source products.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-back-office-conversation-with-karthik/Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-back-office-conversation-with-karthik/I met Karthik Rangappa sometime around 2005. I was trying to sell him an international investing account. I remember going to his office, and we hit it off almost instantly. Later, he helped us build our first website through a friend. This was back when we were called Kamath Associates. He then came to work with us for a bit before going to France to pursue his master’s in finance. He came back and was working on financial education when, in 2013, I reached out and asked him to come build that piece for us.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/happy-40th-nikhil/Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/happy-40th-nikhil/For many years, people called Nikhil “Nithin.” But over the last 3–4 years, with the success of WTF, I’ve been called Nikhil exponentially more. Forget people just calling me Nikhil in person; I now get emails, LinkedIn messages, tweets, etc., addressed to Nikhil every day.😂​ This popularity was bound to happen. Right from when he was maybe 15 or 16, he was always the guy to go to for anything. He somehow always had connections, and the quality of those connections has only improved over time.https://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.