In the sparkling towers of Mumbai’s financial district, where billions are moved and fortunes are made or lost in seconds, a silent crime unfolded, under the blinding light of regulatory inaction. This was not a heist pulled of in the dead of night. It was carried out day after day in full public view, promoted on media and social media platforms, orchestrated by Foreign Portfolio Investments and made possible by the very same regulator who was entrusted with the duty of overseeing the whole process. But it looked the other way.
The Indian stock market, particularly its derivatives segment, has long been portrayed as the great democratic frontier of wealth creation. Every young trader with a phone and a demat account was told that this was their ticket to prosperity.
What they didn’t know was that the game was rigged. Between 2020 and 2025, more than 12 million individual traders jumped into options trading. With every weekly expiry, the market resembled less of a financial institution and more of a betting game, where odds were always stacked against the retail investor and where the FPIs always won. SEBI knew all of this, its own data showed that 93% of retail investors were losing their money (a staggering Rs 1.8 lakh crore worth of money over three years).
By Pawan Khera
25/07/2025