It starts small. A few F&O trades, a YouTube “system”, a WhatsApp group posting sure-shot calls. Soon you are checking option chains during meetings, hiding your phone like a guilty student, replaying a bad trade instead of doing your job.
Some months you feel unstoppable. Others, you give it all back and double down, convinced the next trade fixes the last one.
The hardest part is not the red screen. It is carrying it alone — hiding the losses from a spouse, putting on a brave face while your mind is entirely consumed by the market.
The number nobody wants to sit with
SEBI's own studies on individual derivatives traders are blunt: roughly nine in every ten retail F&O participants lose money. The losses are not one-off. They compound, quietly eroding savings that took a decade to build.
The one in ten who come out ahead almost never got there on gut feel or screen time.
Why competence does not transfer
There is a particular confidence that comes from being good at your work. You built a career on sharp judgement, so it feels unnatural to admit those instincts do not translate.
But the two demand different things. A career rewards domain expertise. Derivatives reward discipline, risk control, and overriding your own instincts at exactly the moment fear or greed is loudest — usually while you are supposed to be doing something else.
Meanwhile the thing actually building your wealth — the salary, the promotion, the compounding of a career — is getting your distracted attention.
Suno sabki, karo dil ki is good advice for choosing a career or a partner. Money does not run on heart. It runs on data, and on distance from your own emotions.
The traders who struggle most are rarely the ones who know too little. They are the ones letting ego rather than evidence pick the next position — at the cost of the job that was compounding their wealth anyway.
By Amit Singla, founder and editor of MF Times. A version of this piece first appeared on Moneycontrol. Educational content only; not personalised investment advice.