Where the “9 in 10” number comes from
It's the most quoted statistic in Indian trading, and it isn't a broker's scare line or a Twitter myth. It comes from SEBI's own research — the regulator pulled actual profit-and-loss data for individual F&O traders and published what it found. Not once, but three times, across four financial years. The number barely moved: roughly 9 out of every 10 individual F&O traders lost money in every period SEBI measured.
Because the headline gets repeated more often than the studies get read, it's worth laying out exactly what SEBI found, what the averages hide, and what — if anything — an individual trader can do with the information.
The three SEBI studies, in plain numbers
- January 2023 — the original study. SEBI's Analysis of Profit and Loss of Individual Traders dealing in Equity F&O Segment looked at FY22 and found that 89% of individual equity F&O traders lost money, with an average loss of about ₹1.1 lakh for the year. This is the study that put “9 in 10” into the vocabulary.
- September 2024 — the update. SEBI widened the window to FY22–FY24 and the picture got worse, not better: 93% of over 1 crore individual traders lost money across the three years, with aggregate losses exceeding ₹1.8 lakh crore and an average loss of around ₹2 lakh per trader, including transaction costs. Participation had nearly doubled in the same period — from about 51 lakh traders in FY22 to 96 lakh in FY24 — so more people were arriving faster than anyone was learning.
- July 2025 — the latest reading. SEBI's updated study on the equity derivatives segment found that in FY25, about 91% of individual traders lost money, and net losses actually widened 41% to ₹1.05 lakh crore — up from ₹74,812 crore in FY24 — even though the October 2024 rule changes (fewer weekly expiries, larger lot sizes) had cut the number of unique individual traders by roughly 20%.
Three studies, three market regimes — a post-COVID bull run, a sideways grind, a rule-tightened FY25 — and the loss rate stayed pinned between 89% and 93%. Whatever is producing the losses, it isn't the year. It travels with the trader.
Reading the numbers like a trader, not a headline
The averages flatten a very unequal distribution. A few details from the 2024 study are more useful than the headline:
- The tail is brutal. The top 3.5% of loss-makers — about 4 lakh people — averaged losses of ₹28 lakh each over the three years. The “average” ₹2 lakh loss is a blend of many small bleeds and some catastrophic ones.
- Costs compound the damage. Individual traders spent roughly ₹50,000 crore on transaction costs over FY22–FY24 — brokerage, exchange fees, taxes. Every extra trade pays this toll whether the idea was good or not, which is why overtrading quietly converts a mediocre process into a losing one.
- Losing didn't stop anyone. More than 75% of loss-making traders kept trading even after losing money in two consecutive years. That single line is the most behavioural finding in the whole study — the data equivalent of refusing to close a red position.
- The cohort is getting younger. Traders under 30 went from 31% of the pool in FY23 to 43% in FY24 — a wave of first-timers entering the segment where the statistics are harshest.
Who are the 1 in 10?
The honest answer from SEBI's data: mostly not individuals at all. The profits on the other side of these losses went overwhelmingly to foreign portfolio investors and proprietary desks — and within those, 97% of FPI profits and 96% of prop-desk profits came from algorithmic trading. Among individuals, only about 1% earned more than ₹1 lakh in profit over the three years after transaction costs.
That doesn't mean an individual trader can't be in the profitable minority — some clearly are. But it does mean the bar is specific: the winners are the ones competing on consistency and cost control, not reflexes. Nobody out-clicks a co-located algorithm. The edge an individual can actually own is boring — defined setups, sizing that survives being wrong, and not donating money to their own worst habits.
Why losses cluster: behaviour, not bad luck
If 9 in 10 traders lost because of bad luck, the studies would show losses scattered randomly. They don't. They show the signatures of specific, repeatable behaviour: traders who keep going after two losing years, loss distributions with a fat tail of blow-ups, and cost bills that only heavy trading can generate. Those are behavioural fingerprints, and each one has a name.
The fat tail of ₹28-lakh losses is what holding losers too long and oversizing look like at scale — small losses that were refused until they became large ones. The 75% who continue after consecutive losing years are living the sunk-cost loop: trading to win it back rather than to follow a process. And the ₹50,000 crore cost bill is what happens when there's no discipline system deciding which trades are worth paying for. Leverage doesn't create these habits — it invoices them at F&O rates.
What a journal can — and can't — do about it
Be clear about what SEBI's numbers do not say: they don't say F&O is unwinnable, and no tool — PnL Book included — can promise to move you into the 1 in 10. A journal doesn't beat the odds for you. What it does is show you, in your own fills and in rupees, which side of the statistics your habits put you on: whether your losers run longer than your winners, whether your trade count spikes after stop-outs, what your revenge trades and moved stops actually cost last month.
The traders in SEBI's 93% mostly never saw their own data — they experienced losses one trade at a time, each one explainable, none of them connected. A structured trading journal connects them. The statistics stop being a national headline and become a personal question: which of these findings is my account quietly reproducing? That question, asked weekly with your own numbers in front of you, is the one part of this entire picture an individual trader fully controls.