Who Really Makes Money in India’s F&O Market?
Smart Money Club Is Asking the Harder Question
For years, the main F&O headline has been simple: more than 90% of retail traders lose money every year. SEBI’s FY25 study says around 91% of individual traders lost. But that is only one side of the story. The harder question is who is making the money.
SEBI’s FY24 data answers it. Individual traders lost about ₹41,500 crore in gross F&O P&L, while proprietary desks and FPIs together made around ₹61,000 crore, and 96% of proprietary-trader profits and 97% of FPI profits came from algo-driven entities. That is who retail traders were competing against. Even individuals who used algos did not escape: as a group, they still lost around ₹13,900 crore on the same basis.
Put together, F&O looks less like a fair game for retail and more like a transfer: individual traders keep entering and mostly keep losing, while the profits keep showing up with professional desks and algo-driven players. That does not mean F&O was created to take money from retail traders. But the money has been moving in one direction for years: away from individuals and towards professional desks.
This is one of the reasons Pranjal Rastogi and CA Harshitha Iyer took Smart Money Club in a different direction. The Surat-based SEBI-registered firm focuses on equity swing and positional trading and has deliberately stayed away from teaching F&O and intraday trading despite steady demand for both.
Their concern was where a beginner starts. If almost all the profits on the professional side come from algos, why are beginners still pushed towards F&O as their first way to earn trading?
For a lot of people entering the market today, F&O is where trading begins rather than where it arrives after years of experience. Options look easy to access, the capital required can look small, and social media is full of gurus promising quick money. Someone who has barely studied a stock can open an account and start trading options almost immediately.
What makes this worse is how F&O is sold to beginners. For an education business, it is the easier product to market: more trades, more screenshots, more action and a simpler promise of quick money. And when people lose, the blame usually comes back to them. If you end up on the losing side, which SEBI’s data says happens to roughly nine out of ten individual traders, the explanation is often that you lacked “discipline” or could not “control your emotions”. Far less attention goes to the fact that you were sent into a market where the other side is often running far more sophisticated systems.
Rastogi and Iyer had already seen how this content cycle works while building Captum, the financial-markets channel that crossed 100,000 subscribers before Smart Money Club took shape. The content that travelled fastest was usually built around a strong hook, a quick takeaway of something that kept people watching till the end. It worked for reach. Teaching someone to trade needed something different, and that shaped what Smart Money Club would focus on.
Smart Money Club was built around swing and positional trading from the start, for people with jobs, businesses and full-time careers: people who could not make the market the centre of their day. For that audience, intraday trading and F&O made little sense. Both require much closer tracking of the market and, with leverage and expiry involved, mistakes get expensive quickly. Swing and positional trading fit better. Trades play out over days or weeks, which gives the trader time to study the overall market, choose the sector and stock, plan the entry and risk, and then manage the position without sitting in front of the screen all day.
That choice set the order of the entire SMC process: market first, then sectors, stock selection, setups, entries, risk and trade management. The same sequence runs through its weekly Live Inner Circle sessions, recorded course videos and its in-house platform, ProScreener.
The firm has worked with more than 16,000 people through its workshops and programmes, most of them working professionals and business owners. For them, a trading style that needs constant decisions through the day would not fit real life. Smart Money Club chose to build around real reality instead of around what was easiest to sell.
Swing trading does not remove risk, and SMC does not present it as an easier route to profits. Stocks can fall, setups fail and traders still make mistakes. The difference is the type of game being played. There is no weekly expiry forcing a position to resolve within a few hours or days. A trader can take time finding the right stock, define the risk before entering and stay out when the market is not offering a trade that fits.
India has made trading easy to access, and that is a good thing. But easy access to a sophisticated product does not make the product simple. If SEBI’s numbers show retail traders losing while professional and algo-driven players take home most of the profits, trading education may need to reconsider where the first lesson begins.
Smart Money Club’s answer is straightforward: a retail trader does not need to become a weaker version of a professional trading desk. They need a style of trading that fits the life they have.
CA Harshitha Iyer and Pranjal Rastogi are co-founders of Smart Money Club. Wealth Vidhya is a SEBI Registered Research Analyst (INH000028352). Views are personal. Investments in the securities market are subject to market risks. Read all related documents carefully before investing.

Smart Money Club Is Asking the Harder Question








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