https://nithinkamath.me/Recent content on Nithin Kamath's personal homepageHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usTue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://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.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/korea-shows-how-leverage-can-amplify-a-market-fall/Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/korea-shows-how-leverage-can-amplify-a-market-fall/My biggest nightmare as a broker is what’s happening in the Korean markets right now. The source of my nightmare is the way our MTF book has been growing along with the industry as a whole. In terms of pure risk, MTF is by far the biggest risk we have taken since we started in 2010. More specifically, the risk lies in our ₹9,000-crore book: at least half of it is in non-F&O stocks, which can hit lower circuits every day without offering an exit.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introduction-of-the-closing-auction-session-cas-from-august-3/Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/introduction-of-the-closing-auction-session-cas-from-august-3/Things get a little more complicated from Monday, August 3. Exchanges are introducing a Closing Auction Session, or CAS, for stocks with F&O contracts. This isn’t a new concept globally. Major exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and London Stock Exchange (LSE) already use versions of a closing auction to determine closing prices. Today, the closing price of a stock in India is based on the volume-weighted average price of trades during the last 30 minutes.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/tax-ready-reports-from-zerodha/Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/tax-ready-reports-from-zerodha/One of the reasons filing takes time is the constant back-and-forth with your accountant. Zerodha’s Tax P&L reports were already largely tax-ready, but over the last few months, we’ve spent quite a bit of time making them even better. Btw, historically, brokers didn’t really provide good tax statements, which made filing taxes on trading and investing a pain in the ***. Around 2013, we realised that this could be a significant value-add for customers, and we became the first broker to offer a dedicated Tax P&L statement.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/why-user-retention-is-difficult-in-broking/Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/why-user-retention-is-difficult-in-broking/One of the biggest challenges of the broking industry is that retaining users is really, really hard. The reason is that most users eventually end up blowing up their accounts. And this isn’t limited to F&O; it happens in equities as well. So, you have to keep running just to stand still, to maintain the number of users on the platform and ensure that the business remains steady. We were looking at some statistics, and one of the surprising things we found was that roughly 55-60% of our users are still active.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/inside-the-making-of-zerodha/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/inside-the-making-of-zerodha/This is my first long conversation in a very, very long time. The idea was to talk about all the things that make Zerodha what it is today, because a lot of people don’t really know how differently Zerodha has been built compared to most other companies. We’ve never raised external capital. We don’t advertise. We don’t have a sales team with sales targets. We don’t do much marketing. We don’t push people to trade or invest.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/kite-nudge-to-warn-you-about-portfolio-concentration/Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/kite-nudge-to-warn-you-about-portfolio-concentration/Saw a tweet of some guy losing all his savings because he invested all his money in 2 stocks. We recently added a nudge on Kite to help investors avoid exactly this scenario. You will now see an alert if a single stock or sector exceeds 50% of your portfolio. While “getting rich” with a concentrated portfolio sounds nice in theory, it’s often a recipe for disaster unless you are a genius stock picker.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/high-leverage-is-pulling-fo-traders-into-crypto/Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/high-leverage-is-pulling-fo-traders-into-crypto/Crypto is thriving because of the lack of regulatory clarity. In the last couple of years, a lot of F&O traders have migrated to crypto because of the low margins and ridiculous leverage they get in crypto F&O—leverage as high as 100x to 200x. From the Money control article.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/will-india-grow-old-before-it-grows-rich/Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/will-india-grow-old-before-it-grows-rich/By 2039, every Indian state will fall below the replacement fertility rate, with Bihar being the last to cross this milestone. The evidence shows that fertility is tightly linked to income and education. Poorer and less educated populations tend to have more children and vice versa. The replacement fertility rate (usually 2.1) is the average number of children each woman needs to have to keep a population’s size the same over time, where new births perfectly cancel out deaths.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/keeping-mutual-fund-investing-direct-and-free/Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/keeping-mutual-fund-investing-direct-and-free/When we started the discount brokerage (flat fee per trade) model in India in 2010, we decided to charge the same fee regardless of trade size. The logic was simple: if the effort to execute a trade is the same, why should customers pay differently? We applied the same logic to mutual funds. We didn’t launch MFs until we could sell exclusively direct plans. You can’t call yourself a discount or a low-cost broker if you charge a percentage fee on transactions, because there’s no incremental effort in executing a larger order.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/intermission-by-the-ken-story-of-airtel/Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/intermission-by-the-ken-story-of-airtel/It’s been almost 20 years since I got my Airtel connection, and I’ve easily paid them more than Rs. 25 lakh in that time. I can’t think of any other business that has made even close to this much money from me. Now the reason why I am saying this is I was watching the latest episode of the Intermission by The Ken. In case you haven’t checked it out, it’s a wonderful show on the history of some of the biggest businesses in India.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/why-a-nice-place-to-work-doesnt-just-happen/Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/why-a-nice-place-to-work-doesnt-just-happen/Yesterday, I was chatting with a relatively new member on the team about what makes Zerodha different, and what I do for a job. What struck me was that his understanding of what makes Zerodha different was superficial. He knew we don’t incite customers to trade, but not much beyond that. And this got me thinking: this probably isn’t just them and is likely true of more of our recent hires; and that’s an onboarding gap we need to fix.https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-cost-of-betting-too-heavily-on-one-sector/Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-cost-of-betting-too-heavily-on-one-sector/For most people, buying a broad basket of stocks or ETFs is a better investment strategy than picking specific sectors and building concentrated stock portfolios. For example, over the last 5 years, the Nifty IT index fell by 8%, while TCS dropped by about 40%. By the way, we are working on a new Kite Nudge that will alert you when you are placing an order, if your exposure to a single sector exceeds X%https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-core-philosophies-behind-zerodha/Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nithinkamath.me/blog/the-core-philosophies-behind-zerodha/Whenever I’m at events or am meeting young entrepreneurs through Rainmatter, the one recurring question I get is what makes Zerodha what it is. We’d created this page to explain what makes us different.