In FY24, 92.50 lakh individuals and proprietorship firms traded in index derivatives segment of NSE and cumulatively incurred a trading loss of Rs 51,689 crore. The Sebi data further shows that out of the 92.5 lakh traders, 85% of them or 78.28 lakh made losses.
The loss is so large that Sebi chief Madhabi Puri Buch called it a “macro issue” at an event on Tuesday. “At Rs 50,000-60,000 crore, that’s pretty macro according to me; this is not about some Rs 200-600 crore,” Buch had said.
The loss will go up further if we consider transaction costs.
The SEBI study found that over and above the trading losses, the loss makers expended an additional 23% of trading losses as transaction costs, while profit makers spent additional 15% of their trading profits as transaction costs during FY22.”After considering the transaction costs, the outcome for FY24 will likely be very comparable to FY22 study, which found 9 out of 10 losing money. On the other side, it has been observed that larger non-individual players that are high-frequency algo-based proprietary traders and/ or Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs), are, in general, making offsetting profits,” Sebi said.
So how big is Rs 51,689 crore? Its over 32% of net inflows into the growth and equity oriented schemes of all mutual funds during FY24. It is also over 25% of the average annual inflows into all mutual funds across all schemes over the past five years, Sebi said.
The regulator now wants to defuse this derivative time bomb in seven steps — limiting the number of weekly options to one per stock exchange, increasing the contract size by 2-3x and hike margin requirements.
Estimates by IIFL Securities shows that about 30-40% of market volumes may get impacted as a result of this.
“Of the 7 measures, we believe restricting weekly options to 1 contract per Exchange is likely to have a significant impact on market volumes. Increasing the contract size by 2-3x initially (and 3-4x after 6 months) would impact retail participation and may reduce the number of active investors. While other measures such as rationalisation of strike price, increase in ELM and restriction on calendar spread margin benefits on expiry day contracts should also lead to some softening of volumes,” IIFL said.
Market insiders recall that in 2014, Korea had also implemented similar measures in the backdrop of similar concerns.
“However, the market there never recovered despite many attempts by the regulators to revive business activity and even 10 years later the volumes are lower than in 2014. It would be therefore important for SEBI to implement changes only in a phased manner so that the overall vibrancy of the market is not impacted by too many hard measures at one time,” B K Sabharwal, Chair – Capital Market & Commodity Market Committee, PHDCCI.