The competition in the stock broking space is intensifying with the gap between the second- and third-largest players by active clients shrinking to its narrowest level in five years.
The number of active clients—defined as those who trade at least once a year—for Zerodha in the nine months ended December stood at 6.85 million, marginally ahead of Angel One at 6.76 million, per NSE data.
The active client count difference between the two stood at 311,000 in the previous fiscal year and a staggering 1.17 million in FY24, per the data.
Officials from Angel One declined to comment prior to the release of the company’s Q3 results, while a query sent to unlisted Zerodha went unanswered until press time.
In a business update to the stock exchanges last Thursday, Angel One reported a 34 basis point (one hundredth of a percentage point) year-on-year growth to 20.4% in Q3FY26 in the retail turnover market share for overall equity, including cash segment turnover, notional turnover for equity futures, and premium turnover for the equity options segment. This market share was marginally down 4 bps from the preceding quarter of the current fiscal year.
Nithin Kamath, co-founder of Zerodha, tweeted in December on social media platform X, “From day one, we’ve avoided the standard playbook for finance apps: no push notifications pushing you to trade, no landing screens showing “trending stocks” or “most traded F&O contracts,” no dark patterns to manufacture activity. In many cases, we’ve actually built features that reduce activity.”
“We want customers who trade thoughtfully to stay with us for longer. This is beneficial for both customers and us. Also, this is why no one at @zerodhaonline is incentivised on brokerage revenue and has been the case since day 1. But I’d be lying if I said it’s easy to resist the FOMO of taking shortcuts that can potentially cause a bump in revenues,” Kamath said.
Slowdown across industry
At the industry level, the overall active client count fell by 4.63 million to 44 million as of December 2025 end, due to Sebi’s graded crackdown on weekly options trading which took effect from November 2024.
The measures included raising ticket sizes for Nifty and Sensex contracts to ₹15–20 lakh from ₹5–10 lakh, increasing extreme loss margins on weekly expiry days, and rationalising the number of weekly expiries an exchange could launch to one each from multiple earlier.
Indeed, this also impinged on the active client count of No. 1 broker Groww, which fell by 790,000 to 12.1 million clients as of December this year from that in FY25.
“The rise in contract sizes to ₹15-20 lakh from ₹5-10 lakh, increase in extreme loss margins on the expiry day of weekly options and rationalisation in the number of weeklies have driven the fall in participation at the lower end of the trading spectrum, especially for of new age digital brokers” said Amit Chandra , vice president (research), HDFC Securities.
“Going forward , we will see more of algorithm versus algo rather than algo versus human trading as the HNIs (high-net-worth individuals) and ultra HNIs spar with HFTs (high frequency traders).”
Angel One shares closed almost 3% higher at ₹2439.3 apiece on Tuesday even as the benchmark Nifty ended 0.22% lower at 25732.3.
