MUMBAI: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is preparing another study on India’s derivatives market, extending a series of reports that have tracked mounting losses among retail investors.
“The study is currently undergoing. We expect to release it in July,” Sebi chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey said at a press conference following the regulator’s board meeting on Friday.
Mint reported in April that Sebi had sought the latest quarterly profit-and-loss (P&L) statements of clients from leading brokerages to assess the full-year financial impact of equity derivatives trading on individual investors.
The regulator relied on similar data for two earlier studies, published in September 2024 and July 2025, which analysed individual traders’ profit-and-loss outcomes beginning FY22. Both reports pointed to a steady increase in losses among retail participants in the equity derivatives market.
In response, Sebi has rolled out a series of measures since November 2024 to curb excessive speculation. These include tripling the minimum contract size, restricting weekly options expiries to one per exchange, revising the methodology for calculating open interest to better capture market risk, and imposing a gross daily exposure limit of ₹10,000 crore for equity derivatives segment (EDS) participants.
A Sebi study covering trading activity between December 2024 and May 2025 found that 91% of individual investors trading in derivatives incurred losses. Retail traders collectively lost ₹1.05 trillion in FY25, a 41% increase from the previous fiscal year.
The findings are consistent with Sebi’s earlier research. Its September 2024 study showed that nine out of 10 individual traders lost money in the futures and options (F&O) segment in FY24, with the proportion of loss-making traders rising to 91.1%, or about 7.3 million investors. That followed a January 2023 report, which found that 89% of individual F&O traders incurred losses in FY22.
