Start with the honest numbers
SEBI has now measured India's F&O crowd several times, and the headline barely moves. Its September 2024 study found that 93% of over one crore individual traders lost money in equity F&O between FY22 and FY24 — about ₹1.8 lakh crore in aggregate, roughly ₹2 lakh per trader. The July 2025 follow-up ran FY25: about 91% lost again, and net losses widened 41% to roughly ₹1.06 lakh crore.
The winning side is thinner than “1 in 10” suggests. Over FY22–FY24, only about 7% of individual traders made any profit at all — and only around 1 in 100 earned more than ₹1 lakh after transaction costs. Even inside that sliver, SEBI's January 2023 study (FY22 data) found profits concentrate hard: the top 1% of active profit makers took roughly half of all net profits earned by active profit makers, and the top 5% took about three-quarters.
What SEBI actually says about the profitable cohort
The studies are loss-focused — SEBI publishes no playbook titled “habits of the 1%”. But a few facts about the winning tail are on the record, and they are worth separating from broker-floor folklore:
- More activity did not mean more profit. When the January 2023 study narrowed to active traders, outcomes got worse, not better: roughly nine in ten active traders lost money in FY22, and after excluding outliers the average profit among the few active winners was small. High trade volume correlated with losing.
- Costs decided the marginal cases. Loss makers paid out, over and above their trading losses, an extra amount worth more than a quarter of those losses in transaction costs — brokerage, STT, exchange and regulatory charges. Churn itself is a tax, before any market view is right or wrong.
- The other side of the trade runs on code. In FY24, proprietary desks booked about ₹33,000 crore and FPIs about ₹28,000 crore in gross F&O profits — and 96–97% of those profits came from algorithmic trading. A discretionary retail scalper is competing with machines on speed; the profitable minority mostly isn't playing that game.
- The newest traders fared worst. The share of under-30 traders jumped from 31% in FY23 to 43% in FY24, and about 93% of them lost money. The FY22 analysis also found the proportion of loss makers highest among the youngest cohorts — and, a detail rarely quoted, a slightly higher share of profit makers among women than men.
Everything beyond this is inference. SEBI has not published stop-loss usage, trades per day, or position-sizing behaviour for profit makers versus loss makers. So treat what follows for what it is: general observations — process habits widely reported by brokers, prop desks and trading-psychology research — consistent with SEBI's data, but not proven by it.
Five process differences a retail trader can copy
- They trade less, and plan more. If churn adds a quarter again to every loss, the simplest structural improvement available to a retail trader is fewer trades. Consistent traders tend to wait for a small set of setups they've defined in advance and pass on everything else — a cap on trades per day does more for most accounts than a new indicator.
- They define the loss before the entry. A fixed rupee risk per trade — decided before the order, not negotiated after — is what makes every other statistic meaningful. Unbounded losses are why a decent win rate still bleeds; the arithmetic is in win rate vs expectancy.
- They size consistently. Same risk after five green days as after a stop-out. “Recovery sizing” — doubling lots to win it back — is how a survivable losing streak becomes a blown account, and it's invisible until something is tracking your size trade by trade.
- They review trades after the fact. Not to relive the P&L — to grade the decision. Was the entry in the plan? Was the stop honoured? A weekly review that judges process rather than outcome is the only feedback loop that improves the next hundred trades instead of lamenting the last one.
- They respect expiry day. Weekly expiries compress a month of theta and gamma into an afternoon. Disciplined traders treat it as a different regime: reduced size, defined-risk structures, or simply no fresh positions after a cut-off time — not a 3:15 PM lottery ticket on a ₹2 NIFTY option.
Notice what these five have in common: every one of them is measurable. Trades per day is a number. Rupee risk per trade is a number. Size after a loss versus size after a win is a comparison your fills already contain, and expiry-day P&L is one filter away. You don't have to wonder whether you're disciplined — a month of your own trade data answers it, habit by habit, in rupees.
Copy the behaviour, not the expectation
A caution, because it matters: none of this is trading advice, and adopting these habits does not put you in the profitable 1%. The base rates are the base rates — in every year SEBI has measured, most individual F&O traders lost money. What process buys you is not a promised outcome but two cheaper things: mistakes that cost less when they happen, and a record honest enough to tell you whether your trading deserves more capital or less.
That record is the practical first step. You cannot check your trades-per-day, your risk consistency or your expiry-day P&L against this list from memory — you need your own trades in front of you. PnL Book builds that record from your broker's order-book screenshots and totals what each tagged habit costs in rupees. Whatever the market does next, at least the “what do I actually do?” question stops being a guess.