Mohit Mehra

This is how we want our customers to feel — like they're "in good hands". From this essay by @kepano.

Here's the thing about India. Every small village has a cricket ground and they will never say no to a stranger also to join in to play. In fact, it's customary to allow the visitor to bat or bowl first. 😁 Had come to this small village for the long weekend. When I spotted this small ground on the morning walk yesterday, I asked a few folks around if they play here in the evenings. They all said yes. I went back in the evening. Got to play like I've always been here. Made a few new friends. We all say cricket is a dying sport and all, I don't think so. It's a team sport that's accessible to so many Indians from small towns and villages. ♥️

I've known @karthikrangappa for almost 30 years. My first interaction was me trying to sell him a Reliance Money demat account as a sub-broker. 😄 In 2014, he was teaching markets on the side while figuring out his next thing. I asked if he wanted to build a proper financial education platform at Zerodha. He said yes on the spot. That's how Varsity started. 12 years, millions of readers. No paywall, no ads, no signups, no spam. He still personally replies to reader questions in the comments. In between, he built Varsity Live, Varsity Junior, Rupee Tales for kids, and more. And now he's turned Varsity's first module into a book, A Beginner's Guide to the Indian Stock Market. Bodybuilder, photographer, teacher, author, coder. What isn't he doing. 😄 Btw, we keep joking with him, is all this education obsession really just a 25-year project to fix his image with his father-in-law, who happens to be a legendary educator himself? 😄

@dineshpaii Its like you said the other day, knowledge that flows to all is the best kind.

@mohitmehra Wahhhh!! Bilkul hi besharam.

Today I was hit with the most profound gyaan ever. I was telling @dineshpaii how great it would be to have put money in Intel and made like 30% in a day. He told me I can buy options & if Im lucky i can make a 100%. When I told him woh nahi karna, he throws - No risk is high risk

@GargPranab @Nithin0dha If you can DM your number, will have our team reach out and figure your query better

@mohitmehra U PPL have designed a complex system of deemat MF with you not keeping the UTR number for me invstmnt in your own fund house. Evn your team was clueless on call whn I askd to map sips 1:1nobody hs taken an effrt to explain even whether ICCL pulls or bank pushes mney. @Nithin0dha

RBI released a consolidated framework on eMandates yesterday. One of the points it covers is the zero-levy charge for using these mandates with your bank. Although this is great, there may still be a charge if your mandate transaction fails due to insufficient funds. Seems fair, it's like a cheque bounce charge that makes sure you maintain funds or pause your mandate. But unlike in a cheque deposit transaction, the effort and costs to a bank are negligible for eMandates. Also, if you use UPI autopay you don't pay any penalty for a bounce. UPI mandates are pretty much the same but with a lower max limit i.e. 1 lakh per day for your mutual fund SIPs compared to a 1 crore using NACH eMandates. Maybe banks should remove this penalty arbitrage between UPI and NACH. P.S. I don't mean banks should introduce a charge for UPI mandates.

Framework notification link - rbi.org.in/Scripts/Notifi…

Brokerages have traditionally offered two types of advisory. One is where the brokerage uses its understanding of markets and instruments to help you avoid mistakes. The other is advisory that is essentially stock tips. A few old-school brokers still stay true to this negative filter approach. Zerodha is on this path as well. We show nudges to help you spot risks in stocks or instruments you might have missed. Over time, we may also help with broader asset allocation. But stock tips don’t fit this philosophy.

Zerodha ruined broking business by shifting focus from advice to brokerage, and the business lost the personal touch, delivery brokerage should never be zero, broker deserves a brokerage because he offered you an investment that can go up 1000 times . Just like buying land or property there should be brokerage. Entire personal touch is lost and focus shifts to trading.

I'm a 4th-generation stockbroker. My family ran a brokerage in Calcutta and we operated things old school. I don't come from a tech background but I was taught to view every business transaction from a client servicing point of view first and revenue second. We came from a school of thought where brokers are like lawyers, doctors. You don't solicit business by selling fear or greed. Making money is important and it's the reason you do business, but the only way to sustainably make money is to keep adding value to the folks you serve. I shut down my family's brokerage because running one in Calcutta in your early twenties, without an understanding of tech or mentors who align with your principles of doing right by people, is nearly impossible. It wasn't losing money. I just couldn't run it the way I believed it should be run. For the most part, I had written off ever working in the capital markets. Then I found Nithin and Zerodha, and the philosophies aligned from day one. No notifications designed to make you trade more, no ads, no tracking your usage to squeeze more revenue. Zero brokerage on delivery, even though every other broker charges for it. That is ₹25,620 crore in revenue we chose not to collect since 2016. We have never raised external capital so there are no investors to show growth numbers to, no pressure to justify revenue targets. And yet 25-30% of our accounts still come from referrals because people who use Zerodha like what they see and tell their friends and family. "Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you" is not a tagline, it's how this place actually runs.

@pipuc101 If you’ve ever worked with a broker who assigns an RM to you, you’d witness massive misselling and trade inducement. The problem isnt online brokers or physical first brokers, the problem is greed getting sold so that the broker can squeeze more money from you.

@mohitmehra These numbers are only for grabbing the eyeballs. Pl also highlight the lacs of crores lost by traders on discount broking platform & bugs ,by design discount broking makes traders trade more and lose more .. Ppl lost far less money in trafing before discount broking arrived!

@dineshpaii 🥲

@mohitmehra Just trying to figure the debate. Nothing more.

Should your UPI payment above ₹10,000 take an hour to go through? RBI just released a discussion paper on curbing digital payment frauds. 4 options on the table: 1. Mandatory 1-hour delay on all UPI/IMPS/NEFT transfers above ₹10,000 2. Trusted person approval for transactions above ₹50K by seniors (70+) and PwD 3. ₹25 lakh annual credit ceiling on accounts — anything beyond goes into shadow credit until you prove it's genuine 4. Kill switch + per-channel on/off controls at account level Option 4 gives users control without adding blanket friction. Options 1-3 punish everyone for the actions of fraudsters. A 1-hour delay on every transfer above ₹10K breaks UPI's core promise. Fraudsters will just split amounts or talk victims into whitelisting.

@dineshpaii You plain dislike me

@mohitmehra Wah, in the morning you were suggesting regulations are naturally framed around these bad actors and have to. :) Workarounds there also are possible.

@stockifiabhijit Funfact: Even the NSE was started by financial institutions and always considered a private entity. It was backed but never owned by the government. People often mistook NSE for a govt. body since financial institutions that started NSE were PSUs.

India's first stock exchange, BSE, was not started by the government. It was started by a group of stockbrokers who met under a banyan tree in Mumbai's business district. #Investingfacts #stockifi

@devinamehra The 93% - 7% split is only for retail traders. The 7% who made money, as per the sebi study, are also retail. This study did not take into account prop or institutional profitability. @grok can you confirm?

Ever wonder that if 93% of derivative traders lose money who are the 7% that make fortunes 🤔 The simple answer is that it is the organised sector, whether domestic or foreign, doing prop trading that is the winner in this game...And I don't need to tell you who is the loser! Prop trading desk market share in all segments is now Cash market:33.6% Derivatives: 58.2% Equity Futures: 33% Equity Options: 50.6% Currency Derivatives: 55.7% For further nuance and some other analysis on this, see the @firstglobalsec Post of yesterday

@InvestorOfJAMMU If Nifty goes to zero, most likely your FDs are zero too. The government has stopped existing in the traditional sense. So maybe your PF doesn’t exist either. The diversification argument collapses completely at this point. Then maybe you need physical gold and firearms 🥲

If Nifty goes to Zero tomorrow, do you have adequate funds in FD, PF or anywhere else to survive??

If you’ve spent any time in finance, you know the tag that comes with it. That you are the money person, the returns guy, the one who sees everything through a spreadsheet. My father has been a stockbroker his whole life, as was his father, and his before that. Three generations on the trading floor, all from Calcutta. He headed the Calcutta Stock Exchange briefly before its demutualisation. By any reasonable definition, a finance person through and through. He also built a temple in a village in Jharkhand in 1994, not commissioned in the way you hand something off, but architected, engineered, and executed by him personally. So, when I say built, thats what I mean. It was inaugurated 23 years ago in Dumbo, Gumla, where he has been doing social work for thirty years with no organisation behind him, no announcements. His father wanted him to build something useful for the community, a complex that could serve real needs, health, schooling, nutrition at a time when access to any of these in a small Jharkhand town was not guaranteed. The Hanuman temple was the heart of that complex, the thing that would hold it together. The structure carries two traditions because he wanted it to, Bengal at the base since that’s where the family comes from, a southern tower rising above it, tiers that have a Deccan influence, because he gave it to Kanchipuram Shankar Peeth (Adi Shankar’s southern seat) and felt the architecture should reflect that. Yesterday was Hanuman Jayanti. I think about everyone I know who works in markets and how spectacularly that one-line description fails them. The things they’ve built, the places they show up to, the inner lives that have nothing to do with their markets terminal. The tag flattens something that is almost always much larger. Finance is what many of us do. It’s rarely all that we are.

@monikahalan @claudeai @grok do this chart for gold 😬

What took me hours of work earlier, @claudeai helped me do in minutes. So, this is India's unluckiest investor's story. He buys the Sensex every year at the 52-week high. And keeps buying for 35 years. He is persistent. He is the unluckiest investor in India. Because each time he invests the market falls (that year). But long-term compounding of the market turns Rs 35 lakh into just over Rs 3 crore. That's a 10.5% return. For the worst-timed investment.

As an investor, one of the things I keep reminding myself is that, for all the bets I take, a few that work out are good enough. But for the founder/entrepreneur, their business is the only bet they have. That means more responsibility to be honest with feedback, ask thoughtful questions, and have the true intent to help them with the smallest of things. Even if we investors do not invest, we are all responsible for helping everyone in the ecosystem. And like the best founders show us, being delusionally optimistic and persistent brings more and more supporters on board. More and more people who help along the way. This conversation with @kushalbhagia, @karthikrangappa, and Nithin Sasikumar was more about what we have seen in the best of the founders. It is not gyaan or some amazing insight we have had on our own. These are all observations from countless conversations. If you are starting out, please do listen to Kushal on how he thinks, and, of course, I have tried to share what we at @Rainmatterin look for in our entrepreneurs. The entire conversation is in the comments. Would love it if some of you could also share honest feedback, even if you disagree with what we are saying. ♥️