Three things have to go right

SEBI published its derivatives study for FY26 this month. Two numbers in it sit near each other and almost nobody has put them together.

• 92% of every rupee individual traders lost came from options.
• 97% of individual traders are option buyers. About 2% are sellers.

Three things, not one

When you buy a call you are not betting that the market goes up. You are betting on three separate things at once, and all three have to land.

Direction. It has to move the way you thought.

Magnitude. It has to move far enough to cover what you paid. Being right by ten points when you needed forty is a loss, not a smaller win.

Timing. It has to do both of those before the contract expires. Not eventually. By Thursday.

Get two of the three right and you still lose. There is no partial credit in an option that expires worthless.

The number that should stop you

59% of index options turnover in FY26 was in contracts expiring the same day. 75% expired within a day. 97% within a week.

So the one instrument that demands you be right about when is being bought, overwhelmingly, with almost no when left in it. The typical retail position gives itself a few hours to be proved correct.

And every hour that passes takes value out of the contract whether the market moves or not. That is not the market going against you. That is the structure charging rent.

Why sensible people do it anyway

None of this is because 78 lakh people are foolish. It is because buying an option is the only trade in the market that feels safe.

It costs ₹400 instead of ₹4 lakh. The loss is capped at what you paid. There is no margin call. And when it works, the payoff is the kind of number people remember telling their friends about.

Every one of those is true. Together they describe a lottery ticket — priced by people who do this for a living, sold to people who do not.

The obvious next thought, and why we are not making it

SEBI's data shows option sellers had positive median returns. It is tempting to read that as the answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

It is not. Selling replaces a capped loss with an uncapped one. It needs capital most people do not have sitting as margin. And when it goes wrong it destroys an account faster and more completely than buying ever does. The 2% are not 2% by accident.

The point is not that one side is right. It is that most people chose a side without knowing they were choosing.

Twenty minutes tonight

Pull up your last twenty option trades. For every losing one, put it in exactly one of three buckets.

1. I was wrong about direction.
2. I was right about direction, but it did not move far enough.
3. I was right about direction and size, but not before expiry.

Then count.

If most land in bucket 1, your problem is analysis, and more study genuinely helps.

If most land in bucket 2 or 3 — and for most people they will — your analysis was fine. You were right, and you paid anyway. What beat you was the structure you chose to express the view in: too little time bought, too far out of the money, too much of the premium made of hope.

That is a completely different problem, and it does not get fixed by getting better at reading charts.

One last number

87.7% of individual traders lost money last year. Of the ones who lost two years running and carried on, about 90% lost again in the third.

That is not what bad luck looks like. Bad luck does not find the same person three years in a row, ninety times in a hundred. That is a process, repeated without ever being inspected.

Twenty minutes and three buckets is an inspection.

The Markets Story

We exist to change that number.

Education, not advice. No tips, no calls, no signals, no recommendations to buy or sell anything. Trading carries substantial risk. Source: SEBI study of individual traders in equity derivatives, FY26.