Best days of brokerage industry are behind us: Zerodha's Nithin Kamath

Stock brokerage firm Zerodha's chief executive, Nithin Kamath, on Thursday said 2024 was the best year for the brokerage industry, but its peak may be over now.

On social media platform X Kamath said, “Looking back, 2024 was probably the best year for the brokerage industry, and it's starting to look like the best is behind us, at least for the foreseeable future.”



He added, “In terms of options turnover, we are back to 2022–23 levels. This is even before the impact of the increased lot sizes, which take effect in January 2025.”

Zerodha also published a post reviewing 2024 at both Zerodha and across the broking industry.

Regulatory changes

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has introduced several regulatory measures for the market. These include:

From December 1 last year, weekly expiries are limited to one contract per exchange and only one benchmark index—Nifty 50 for NSE and Sensex for BSE.

All monthly expiries of options contracts on an exchange will now occur on the same day of the month. This eliminates the regulatory arbitrage of trading weekly expiries in other index contracts during the last week of the month.

An additional margin of 2% of the contract size was imposed on all short option contracts to discourage excessive activity on the expiry date.

All market infrastructure institutions, like stock exchanges, to be “true to the label” in how they levy charges.

The market regulator has made it mandatory for clearing corporations to directly transfer the securities into demat accounts of the clients.

From February 1, option buyers must pay the entire option premium upfront. This move aims to curb excessive leverage offered by some brokers during intraday options trading.