I Lost 2.38 Crore Trading Options. Here's Why I Now Refuse Most of the Trades I Find.
Today I trade less than I ever have in my life. Here is what I found buried in SEBI's own data that made the difference.
Every week, someone messages me asking which strike to buy.
Every week, I watch another trader do exactly what I used to do.
And every week, I tell them the thing they do not want to hear.
Because after years in this market, I have learned what actually kills retail traders in this country. And more importantly, what stops it.
The pattern is always the same. A good month. Then a bigger position. Then one bad week that takes the good month and eight more with it.
"You just need a better strategy," everyone says. I said it myself for years.
But when it was my turn, I lost 2 crore 38 lakh.
Not on paper. Not on a screen. Real money, gone, in a way that could not be argued with.
There is a particular silence that arrives after a number like that. The position is closed. There is nothing left to click. The room is very quiet, and the only thing still moving is the arithmetic in your head, working out how many trades and how much size it would take to make it back.
I know what 2am looks like from that chair. I know what it is to promise yourself that this is the last time, and to mean it completely, and to break the promise by 9:15 the next morning.
And I know what it is to sit at dinner with people who love you and not say the number out loud. Because saying it out loud makes it real.
Then I found the data that changed everything.
The Number SEBI Published That Nobody Wants to Talk About
In FY 2024-25, SEBI studied roughly 96 lakh individual traders across the country's 13 largest brokers. Not a survey. Not a sample of beginners. Actual trading data.
One lakh crore. Gone from ordinary Indian households. In twelve months.
Your broker is legally required to put this in front of you every time you log in. Nine out of ten lose. You have scrolled past that box a hundred times without reading it.
So had I.
And every course, every guru, every YouTube channel pointed at the same explanation for it. You need more experience. Trade longer. Learn more setups. Put your screen time in and you will come out the other side.
But something about that explanation felt incomplete.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
So I went back into the same SEBI study and read the parts nobody quotes on social media.
SEBI separated out what they called regular traders. The experienced ones. People who had traded consistently for three straight years. The ones who had already done exactly what everybody told me to do.
Read that again, because it took me a long time to accept it.
Experience was not the answer. Experience was just a longer runway to the same crash.
Then I found the line that broke my brain.
SEBI also measured who was taking the money on the other side of all those losing trades. The proprietary desks. The foreign investors. The handful of participants who were actually profitable.
Sit with that for a second.
The people winning my money were not predicting better than me. They were not smarter, they were not luckier, they did not have a strike price I had failed to find. They had removed the human decision entirely, and replaced it with a system that scores conditions and acts only when the score is there.
I was turning up every morning with a gut feeling and six group chats. They were turning up with a checklist that runs identically every single day, on every single trade, forever.
That was never a fair fight. It was not even the same sport.
What if the problem was never my strategy? What if the problem was that I built a brand new decision every morning, from scratch, out of nothing?
That's When I Built MarketScore
I could not build a proprietary desk. I did not have their capital, their engineers or their co-located servers, and neither do you.
But I could take the one thing that actually made them different. They score before they act.
Not an indicator. Not a signal group. Not a prediction.
A score.
Now, before I risk a single rupee, I do not ask whether it is going up. I ask a colder question. What is the score.
An illustration of the habit, not a recommendation or a signal.
If the score is not there, I do not take the trade. That is the entire rule. No score, no trade.
The Number I Started Watching Instead
Here is what actually changed for me, and it is not the number you are expecting.
I stopped watching my P&L every day. It was making me worse. A red day made me revenge trade. A green day made me oversize. And neither number told me the only thing that mattered, which was whether I had done my job properly that morning.
So I started tracking one thing instead. How many trades I took that had no score.
I am not going to show you a spreadsheet of it, because I never kept one properly and I am not going to invent one now. What I can tell you is what changed. I traded a lot less. And for the first time I could say out loud why I was in every position I held, which I could not have done in the ten years before it.
I still remember the first morning the score told me to sit out. Everything in me wanted to trade. I had shown up. I had done the work. The market was open, and doing nothing felt exactly like failing. So I sat on my hands and hated every minute of it.
By 3:30 that afternoon, the setup I had been itching for was deep underwater.
And for the first time in years, I had not lost money on a day I was completely certain about.
The best trade I make most weeks is the one I do not take.
Why This Works, In Plain English
I could bury you in Greeks and volatility surfaces. Here is what you actually need to know instead.
Every single morning you make roughly the same decision. In, or out. Made on a mood, that decision is a coin flip wearing the costume of insight. Made against a score, it becomes a filter.
A filter does not have to be brilliant. It only has to be consistent. That is the entire edge, and it is the exact reason 96% of the money coming off the other side of your trades was made by machines rather than by geniuses.
You are not going to out-predict an algorithm. Nobody is. But you can absolutely out-discipline the 91%, because most of them have no process at all.
You are not losing to the market. You are losing to the version of yourself that shows up at 9:15 with a feeling.
What Happened When Other Traders Ran It
"I have taken three of these sessions now. What actually changed for me was that I stopped opening a position the second I felt the urge. I wait for the score. Some days that means I place nothing, and a month ago that would have felt like I was missing out."
That is the whole thing, Rahul. The best trade most weeks is the one you did not take. Nobody claps for it, which is exactly why almost nobody does it.
"Coming in I thought I needed a better entry strategy. Turns out I needed to actually write down why I was entering. The moment I had to give the trade a number before taking it, half of them stopped making sense."
You did not need a new strategy. You needed to make yourself say the reason out loud before the money went in. That sentence is the strategy.
"Honest question, does this work if I only trade gold and a couple of forex pairs? I do not touch crypto at all."
Yes. The instruments change, the habit does not. Gold and the majors are scored exactly the same way. Come to a session and watch me run XAU live, you will see what I mean.
Questions from the live-session chat, answered by Shamique and shown with permission.
Why I Cap the Room
I am not going to manufacture a countdown timer for you. Here is the actual constraint.
I teach this live, I score real setups in front of the room as they happen, and I answer questions until they stop coming. The room caps at a thousand a week, and I will be straight with you about what that means. Once it is full I do not get to every single question. I get to as many as I can, and the checklist you leave with is built so that you do not need me for the rest of them.
The session is also paid, and that is on purpose. When I ran it free, the room filled up with people who never opened the app again. A small commitment does more filtering than any application form ever will. It is not much. You will see the number on the next page, with a reader discount already applied.
You Should Be Skeptical Of Me
You have been sold edited screenshots by people who have never once shown you a losing day. Rented cars. Backtests that were discovered, conveniently, in hindsight. So let me be exact about what this is not.
I show the losing trades. I show the skipped ones. A scoring habit means nothing at all unless you can watch it be wrong, and mine is wrong regularly. Anyone can post their wins. The only signal worth trusting is the one that shows you its bad days.
I am not SEBI registered. I do not give advice and I am never going to tell you what to buy. I am going to show you how to score, and then the decision stays yours, which is exactly where it should have been the whole time.
The Bottom Line
I think about that SEBI number often. 91%. One lakh crore in a year. And almost every rupee of it lost by someone who was trying hard, who had bought the courses, who genuinely believed the next strategy would be the one.
I was one of them for years, and I have the hole in my life to prove it.
You might be reading this on a morning where you have already decided what you are going to trade. You have the six group chats open. You have the feeling.
That feeling is not insight. I promise you. I had the same one, and it cost me 2 crore 38 lakh and the better part of a decade I do not get back.
I did not get rich quickly after that. I got steady. The market opens and I already know what I am doing. My evenings belong to my family instead of to a chart. There is a watch on my wrist in these photographs and I know exactly how that reads to you, because I have rolled my eyes at the same photograph on somebody else's page. It is not the point. It was never the point.
The point is the boring habit that made every ordinary Tuesday afterwards possible. And I can hand you that habit in an afternoon.
Come watch me score the live market for 90 minutes.
One session. No secret indicators, no guaranteed anything, nothing held back for an upsell. I score real setups in front of you, including the ones I skip, and you leave with the checklist to run it yourself the next trading morning.
Readers of this article get a discount applied automatically on the next page.
Shamique Hussain is the founder of MarketScore, an educational trading product built by SimsInfotech. After losing 2 crore 38 lakh in India's equity derivatives market, he spent the following years building a pre-trade scoring habit modelled on how institutional desks actually make decisions. He has traded since 2011. He teaches the habit live every week, shows the setups he skips alongside the ones he takes, and is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.
From readers and past attendees of the live session.