Zerodha

Founder & CEO

Rainmatter

Rainmatter — an initiative by Zerodha — funds and incubates innovative
Indian fintech startups focusing on saving and investing. https://rainmatter.com/

Rainmatter Foundation — funding startups & grassroots organizations working on climate change.  https://rainmatter.org/

Kamath Associates

Franchisee of Reliance Money, Proprietary Trading, Portfolio advisory services

Partner

Manipal Infocom

Traded during the day, Telesales at Nights (Call centre focused on US markets)

Senior Telesales Executive

Self Employed

Proprietary trading while pretending to attend college @Bangalore Institute of Technology

Proprietary Trader

Over a decade of trading the markets for a living.  Felt the fatigue, and with Zerodha decided to be the catalyst for change and started a brokerage firm that traders didn't have. 
Musings on finance, business, and life: https://nithinkamath.me/

This has to be the most unique use case for Kite APIs 😂 

Pankaj Tanwar

Nithin Kamath

Founder & CEO at Zerodha & Rainmatter. Learning at Rainmatter foundation. Views are personal. Nothing here is advice.

Congrats on the IPO, Lalit Keshre & team, and best of luck. 

Btw, about 20% of all Groww IPO applications are from Zerodha customers. 😛

Groww

Of everyone I’ve met, Adnan Adeeb has to be one of the most passionate advocates for fitness and getting Indians to participate in active sports. His company, Devils Circuit, has faced its fair share of obstacles and ups and downs — but the mission remains strong: inspiring Indians to take a greater interest in their health and fitness.

And my gut tells me, the time when we truly start caring more about our health is coming soon. 😬 Until then, as Adnan says, the war cry remains: Booyah!!!

Seema and I recently recorded a podcast with Adnan, talking about how fitness and health continue to play a crucial role in our lives — especially after everything we’ve been through (Seema battled cancer, and I went through a stroke).

As Rocky Balboa said, “It ain’t about how hard you’re hit, it’s about how you can get hit and keep moving forward.” 😀 


Link to the podcast in comments.

में Yoddha I Devilslayer I Founder I Entrepreneur I Investor I Motivational Speaker

Devils Circuit

I just discovered that Robinhood will generate approximately $150 million (~₹1,300 crores) in revenue from the fees it charges for processing instant client withdrawals. Their cost to process these is around $35–40 million, which means a clean $100 million to the bottom line, and that’s just from instant withdrawals. 😬

As an Indian startup with some scale, founders dream of generating revenue like this from non-core products. Hence the rush to introduce everything: loans, insurance, payments, and other financial services. But nothing really works 😀 outside the core offering. It just shows how far behind India is compared to the US when it comes to customers willing to pay for add-ons.

By the way, I’m still shocked that people pay 1.75% on an instant withdrawal transaction. This really shows how broken the US banking system is. Even in 2025, there’s still no full-fledged instant payments system like UPI — most fund transfers take a couple of days!

For comparison, we don’t charge Zerodha clients for deposits (thanks to UPI) or instant withdrawals. We’ve processed over ₹50,000 crores in instant withdrawals in <2 years, at zero cost. 🙈

If you take money out of a business as dividends, the effective tax rate is 52% (25% corporate tax + 35.5% on personal income). Through capital gains, it's just 14.95% (with cess).

Why does this matter? Here’s what you should know if you invest in IPOs.

If you're an investor (especially a VC), the math is simple: reduce corporate tax by showing minimal profits or losses. Spend (Burn) on acquiring users, build a growth narrative, and then sell shares at a higher valuation while paying much lower tax.

This spending also makes it harder for competitors to survive. To be clear, we're not discussing R&D spending here, which, incidentally, is very low in India (0.7% of GDP).

What's often overlooked is that VCs are essentially playing a tax arbitrage game. Look at most VC-backed businesses listed in the last few years, the reason they show little or no profit is partly due to this. Once you run a business this way, it's extremely difficult to switch.

Every startup that's 7-8 years old from the time of raising the first round faces constant pressure from VCs for an exit. With almost no M&A opportunities in India, IPO is often the only way out.

The government probably designed this tax arbitrage to incentivize companies to spend money and not just accumulate and distribute. But I'm unsure if the balance is correct. I think it's also creating businesses that aren't very resilient. One prolonged market downturn, and many of these unprofitable companies would struggle to survive.

Two things that make this more interesting:

Unprofitable growth gets valued at much higher multiples than steady profits. A company doing ₹100 cr revenue with 100% growth might get 10-15x, while a profitable one with 20% growth gets 3-5x. So VCs aren't just saving on tax; they're in essence creating a 3x higher exit valuation.

If you're competing against someone burning cash, you almost have to match it to defend market share, even if you don't want to, because of the quirks I mentioned above.

Portfolio update of a colleague at work. He's now invested in 3,100 stocks (it was 2,100 last time), taking diversification to its logical extreme. 😀

At least he's beating G-Secs.

Btw, you can check your account's performance on Zerodha Console.

Digital gold is unregulated. A timely reminder from SEBI.

Most people don’t realize that nobody regulates digital gold, and if something were to happen to the platforms or companies selling it, there’s not much you can do.

It’s also a subpar way to get exposure to gold. You pay 3% GST the moment you buy. Then there are spreads of another 2–3%, which means as soon as you purchase digital gold, you’re already down about 6%, and that’s before even factoring in regulatory risk.

Now that Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGBs) have stopped, gold ETFs remain one of the safest and easiest ways to get exposure to gold. We wrote about all this on Markets by Zerodha Daily Brief (link in the comments).

The other common trading mistake I have seen over and over again in all my years of being a trader and running a brokerage is over-trading and revenge trading. 

Sometimes, the best trade is the one you don't take.

This is why we, Zerodha, launched Kill Switch. If you get the urge to keep trading, you can enable it, and you won't be able to place trades for the rest of the day. 

See the link in the comments to know how to use it.

Given how hot the IPO market is, I'm hearing some phenomenally stupid stories from the unlisted market. People are blindly punting on so-called "pre-IPO" companies hoping they'll make bigger gains than during the actual IPO.

The greed is causing people to ignore some hard realities: these shares already come with 100–500% markups, ridiculous commissions, and terrible pricing. The biggest risk? There have been numerous cases where the IPO price ended up lower than the price at which people bought shares in the unlisted market. All those "gains" wiped out before you even start.

I honestly didn't expect the unlisted share space to become this popular. Colleagues showed me a platform sending WhatsApp blasts pushing this stuff. It's kind of crazy what's happening out there.

Read more, link in the comments.

Never hide your emotions, always feel them raw — Aristotle.  😅 


On a serious note, this grayscale mode is a legit use case, and it can help to reduce anxiety. Coming to Kite soon. 😀

At Rainmatter by Zerodha  Health, we're experimenting with something beyond just writing checks. 

We're creating participatory sports events through an initiative called peakst8 . We've been going around the country with Founders Peak—getting health founders (and others) to participate, not just network over coffee. 

Last weekend was our first grand event: "No Parking." Booked the entire basement at Brigade, Orion Mall (thanks, Nirupa Shankar!), Bengaluru. Around 1,000 runners representing 38 corporates, 45 communities, and 43 run clubs were participating in various activities, including running, rowing, cycling, and more. The energy was incredible.

The thesis is simple: people need more reasons to think about fitness. The odds of people wanting to get fit may be higher if they see the fun and participatory side. 

The next big one is the Peakst8 festival in January.

Infy is one of the most highly held stocks by investors, and the record date for their massive buyback is November 14th, the biggest buyback ever in India. That is, you can participate in the buyback if you hold the shares in your demat account as of November 14.

I think it is essential to understand how you will be taxed on this. If you participate in the buyback at Rs 1800 (current price is ~Rs 1550), here's the taxation:

The money you receive from the buyback is considered income from other sources and is taxed at your applicable slab rate. And, the entire investment value is then considered as a capital loss. 

One scenario where the buyback becomes attractive is when you have other capital gains that can be offset against these capital losses. By the way, if the investment was done <1year, then it is a short-term capital loss, and >1 year, it is a long-term capital loss. 

Otherwise, it is essentially like a dividend.  

Btw, the Tax P&L reports on Zerodha Console have a separate section for buybacks to make things easy for you

Zerodha LIQUIDCASE is India's first liquid ETF with a growth NAV, and we launched it in January 2024. In just under two years, it's incredible that the AUM has reached almost ₹6,000 crores. 

All of this growth is organic, from traders and investors discovering the ETF and investing in it. We haven't really spoken about it much, and you can't pay commissions on an ETF anyway.

The innovation here was simple: no dividends, because they were tax-inefficient and a pain to redeem and track. I can't figure out why other AMCs didn't do this before us. Kudos to Vishal Jain and the Zerodha Fund House team for figuring this out.

Good investing is boring | CEO @ Zerodha Fund House

Zerodha Fund House

3500+ companies have reported earnings, and there's a broad-based recovery across sectors.

"Aggregate revenues have risen 8.2% year-on-year, while EBITDA and PAT climbed 14.1% and 16.0%, respectively. Excluding Financial Services, profit growth accelerated to 22.5%"

Perhaps this explains why indices are holding up much better than most bears had expected. Hoping this earnings strength sustains 


Data from IndiaDataHub


Link to the article in the comments.

IndiaDataHub

Crypto derivative exchanges exist in regulatory limbo. A bit like Schrödinger's cat—neither fully regulated nor unregulated. This ambiguity is being exploited in dangerous ways. By the way, I am not referring to the actual buying and selling of Cryptocurrency.

The first risk with unregulated platforms is, of course, that there's nothing you can do if something goes wrong. 

The other big problem with crypto F&O is that you have no idea who's on the other side of your order. In many cases, the platform itself can be the counterparty to all trades, like dabba trading or CFDs. If the platform is the house, the incentives are distorted. It's good for the platform if the customer loses money because every customer win is the platform's loss.

To make matters worse, these platforms offer 100 to 200x leverage. At that level, even a small move is enough to make you go bust. Considering the volatile nature of crypto, this is all but guaranteed.

The lack of regulatory clarity on crypto derivatives is not a good thing in the long run for anyone and has to be fixed.

Most traders know that you can't predict the markets, but they trade as if they can. This has to be the most common and costly trading mistake of all. Goes to show the difference between knowing and doing. 

S. Sandeep Rao recently recorded a podcast with the great Tom Sosnoff, co-founder of Thinkorswim and tastytrade, on our new YouTube channel, and here's what Tom said:

"It takes a long time to convince yourself to learn certain things—mostly because we all have big egos and our own ideas. It took me a really long time to realize that I don’t actually know what’s going to happen next. I used to think I had an edge because I’ve spent four and a half decades watching markets. I’d tell myself, “Nobody has watched more ticks in the S&P than I have over the last 40 years, so that should give me an edge.”

But it doesn’t. And it took me a long time to appreciate that I don’t have any real edge over anyone else when it comes to predicting what happens next. I do have some comfort in having seen just about everything once or twice, but that’s not an edge." 

Tom has been trading for decades, and there are so many takeaways in the conversation. Check out the link to the video in the comments.

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